Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  3

  JOEY HAD HEARD IT a million times, like an invocation: Amsterdam, golden Amsterdam, totally awesome city of good times. Smoke pot all day! Have sex with hot prostitutes! She’d listened to these claims while tending bar, nodding at the hipsters who swore Amsterdam was a flat-out heaven on earth.

  “My brother went there, Joey, and it’s all true.”

  “My cousin lived there, man, it was heaven.”

  She’d nodded and polished glasses, imitating Ted Danson on Cheers, a mild smile, sagacious. But Ted Danson didn’t drink. And she was no sage.

  “My uncle married a Dutch woman, and she took him to sex clubs all the time. Fucking sex clubs, Joey! All! The! Time!”

  Lies, she thought, dodging cyclists and trams. Everyone here was perfect and buttoned up. The pot shacks, such as the Grasshopper, which Joey entered to drink away the morning, were places no Dutch citizen would be caught dead. She went downstairs into the fetid tourist grotto, sat at the bar, ordered a Stella, felt her morning cocaine course through her blood. She dangled her high heels, massaged her lame left leg, and surveyed the scene: British football drunks watching BBC1 and playing pool, backpackers checking their e-mail, and young Americans gazing about like they were at Disney World. Oh my God, is it true that we can buy pot in here? Dude, they have a fucking marijuana menu at the bar, just like ordering a drink. You do it. No, you do it. OK, I’ll totally do it, but you’ve got to come with me! Get the sensimilla! Get the Panama Red! No, get both, dude! They have Hawaiian Gold too? Dude, get all three! Taste test! Taste test!

  She was satisfied with this purgatory; the pot shack was a fine location to lick her wounds, wipe herself off the heel of John Hackney’s boots of Spanish leather, and accept the idea that, truly, today was the culmination of two years of downward momentum.

  Joey remembered a picture from National Geographic that hung in the break room of Spaceland, a snap of the southernmost road on earth, in Tierra del Fuego: a dirt lane fading to grass, and a sign in Spanish saying, You are officially at the bottom of the world. Next stop, the South Pole.

  Darlo would be calling soon, and what would she tell the deluded porn prince? All is lost, friend. We are drifting into regions of ice. We are through.

  Of course he wouldn’t believe it. Darlo had no conception that the end was near. The sun will rise in the west before we get dropped, he’d often promised Joey, in moments of managerial doubt and dismay. Darlo would put his arm around her and squeeze her shoulder pads and say, It’s all good, babe, we shall overcome. Put your chin up, Ms. Manager.

  It had to be nice having an über-dad, she thought, arming you with a heavy dose of the sociopathology necessary to succeed in the world. Joey had always thought she possessed some quality Ayn Randitude, but this entire experience had proven her to be so fucking bush league. At least when it was all over, she would be able to carry on. Darlo, when the news actually punctured his resilient dream world, would deflate, shrivel up, and float away.

  She listened to a pool table of English dogs argue about the merits of the Aston Villa, Nottingham, and Wigan squads. A crew of college girls, de facto American in their Juicy sweats and Ugg boot sorority tourist bling, baited each other to buy pot, while the guy behind the counter, an old, mutton-chopped tough who could have been the Who’s European tour manager in the seventies, looked right through them and sipped coffee. Soon the English dogs were hitting on the girls, buying them drinks and doing everything short of humping their legs in a scene of total thoughtless pleasure. Joey could not have envied them more. At the same time, she wanted to smash their faces against the oak bar.

  She recognized these feelings as a sign to go somewhere else. And then she heard it, coming from the TV.

  “Oh no,” she moaned. “No, no, no.”

  It was the Sharpie Shakes commercial. Sharpie Shakes, the formerly unknown ice cream company that two years back had approached Blood Orphans with an opportunity. Please write our jingle. Please be on our commercial. Please be the Sharpie Shakes house band.

  Everyone but Joey thought it was a great idea. The Sharpie Shakes people had been so hooked by the advance copy of Rocket Heart Steadman had slipped them that they’d offered a sweet licensing situation and a fat fee up front, one that would have netted each band member a hundred grand and the manager even more.

  But Joey, back then, had leverage with her boys. After all, she’d just gotten them the record deal of the century, hadn’t she?

  “Terrible idea,” she’d said, swinging a pool cue in Darlo’s basement. “It’ll turn the Blood Orphans brand into a kiddie joke-metal band. We’ll be like Smash Mouth, with a fan base whose average age is ten.”

  “Not with those lyrics we won’t,” Darlo said.

  The cue flew out of her hands and clanged against the wall, dropping the dartboard.

  “It’s a slippery slope,” she said. “We need smooth longitudinal thinking, not flash-in-the-pan antics. Aerosmith would never have done something like this back when they were starting out. I’m begging you guys to listen to me.”

  “If you think it’s right,” Darlo said, and sank the eight ball. “I trust you.”

  “Fine, fine,” Shane said, thumbing through a copy of Penthouse.

  “That’s crazy!” Bobby said, and no one had cared.

  In the intervening two years, Sharpie Shakes had become the biggest success in ice cream since Häagen-Dazs. And that damn jingle, performed by some band from Los Angeles that sounded like every other bastard son of Nirvana and Green Day, followed them everywhere. That jingle made it cool for teenage white kidz to love ice cream. It made ice cream Wylde and Krazy.

  She covered her ears but resistance was futile.

  It’s the razor-sharp taste of good times to come.

  It’s a cool summer day, smooth, fresh, and homespun.

  It’s the most awesome times with your friends …

  It’s the half-pipe, the pipeline, the raddest weekend!

  Sharpie Shakes, the fun in the sun, you betcha!

  Sharpie Shakes, creamy and smooth, it’ll getcha!

  The sorority girls, in the middle of the first legal joint of their life, jumped up and giggled.

  “I love Sharpie Shakes!” one of them said. Lovely tits bounced in tight red fleece. “Awesome!”

  Joey had really told those ice cream executives what was what.

  “We’re not a shill for the ice cream business,” she’d said in a corporate conference room in Burbank. “Our target market isn’t little kids. They’ll buy a Sharpie Shake and then they’ll buy the record and then the parents will hear the lyrics and lose their mind. They won’t understand the irony. Warner Brothers will never forgive us.”

  Forget that Steadman’s only words concerning the matter were Go for it.

  Now Sharpie Shakes Inc. was the lead sponsor for this year’s CMJ Music Marathon. They were cross-marketing with Rolling Stone, Adidas, and British Knights. They were putting up mass kiosk action on the Warped Tour, at Bonnarroo, at Coachella. A Sharpie Shake hadn’t been near a teenybopper since the rebranding. Smooth longitudinal thinking, my ass.

  The pop-punk jingle, performed by some band that made Blood Orphans sound like Zeppelin, reverberated out of the Grasshopper’s projection-screen speakers.

  … fun in the sun, you betcha!

  Every time she heard it, Joey died a little. Every time Darlo heard it, he called Joey.

  “I’m just listening to the sound of more money going down the drain, you shortsighted poser. How’s your day going?”

  Well, she thought, if she heard it, so did the band. All over Amsterdam. Her incompetence in every grocery store. A reminder to the four of them of what a fuckup she was, all over the pretty, foggy city.

  “So unfair,” she mumbled. Draining her Stella and feeling her leg tense up completely, she dropped twice the amount she owed on the bar — damned if she was gonna get cheap now — and limped up the stairs.

  The Grasshopper lay on Oudebrugsteeg, whi
ch on this any-other-Friday resembled a perfect location for a Fodor’s photo shoot, teeming with tourists framed by thousand-year-old, skinny buildings. Diesel engines went toot toot, pigeons fluttered around, sharply dressed businesspeople went about their perfect Dutch business, and everywhere, moving around them like plasma holding tissue together, ran the army of three-speed bicycles. Amsterdam was gray all right, here in autumn’s final trimester, but it had a level of adorable quaintness that, if you were, say, a rapidly intoxicating, coked-up, small-time failure of a rock band impresariette, had a moderately soothing effect. She took out a pack of cigarettes, sat on the nearest bench, and let the sound of church bells ring in her ears.

  Bleary with beer, she had been ignoring, from the depths of her red Kate Spade bag, the ringing of her Iridium satellite phone, a thousand-dollar-a-month, three-pound piece of hardware that ensured that if she were ascending the peak of Everest or kidnapped on a freighter in the Black Sea, she’d still be able to check her voicemail. But now she thought, Shit, why spend all that money if I’m just gonna let it ring? What if it’s Hackney taking it all back and ordering me to his hotel room? She pulled out the hunk of beeping black scrap metal.

  “Joey, it’s Adam.”

  “Oh, hi, Adam.”

  In one way or another she felt bad for all the members of Blood Orphans, but Adam was special. She had an extra shot of sympathy for him, even though he’d retained all his money, stayed above the fray, and suffered with the silence of the eventually validated.

  “Today sucks a fat rod,” she said. “Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. Morten’s apartment is freezing and smells like mold. I was wondering if you wanted to go to the Van Gogh Museum.”

  “No.”

  “But it’s our tradition.”

  “Tradition. What’s that?”

  “Come on, Joey.”

  She grunted in grudging assent. On the first tour of Europe, she had gone along for a week, and the two of them had been the only ones who didn’t say, Tate Gallery what? And Louvre shmovre! And Prado shmado! What is that, like, a clothing museum?

  “Fine,” she said, hangdog, “if you’re prepared to deal with me drunk and coked up.”

  “Like any other day?”

  “Mean,” she said. “So mean to me.”

  “You started it.”

  “Half an hour,” she said, and dropped the phone back in her bag.

  Joey headed south, crossed canal after canal, muttering to herself over the astounding foxiness of Amsterdam boys, pressed and coiffed, riding their dingy grandma bikes, scarves flitting around their heads, with their smooth side parts and slim-cut suits, with their ankle boots and alabaster skin and pointy noses, modern Von Trapps. Said cute boys kept almost running her over, though, but the pointy noses and milky skin made up for it.

  A tram whizzed by. She felt the grit of the coach graze her skin. She retreated to the sidewalk and dry-popped a few Tylenol.

  These Dutch had a completely different orientation toward public space. They had to be, like, ten times as aware of their surroundings as Americans. The trams went through the middle of the city. In America the streets would run with blood, but here everyone weaved and bobbed and hopped around each other, danced between the civic raindrops with their navigational sixth sense. She was just a small, slow-moving American lump to be avoided.

  Fucking Dutch with their extra Public Space Gland.

  But at least the Dutch weren’t looking for a fight. Blood Orphans was the very personification of every cliché about America, arrogant and materialistic, and the band’s behavior had grown steadily worse, from practiced bratty to full-on revolting. What other band could go to Sweden, the least belligerent place on earth, and start a riot? If they had sold a million copies, they would just be considered roguish or difficult. But they hadn’t. They’d sold exactly 3,451 copies. Joey wasn’t sure what that made them, besides losers.

  Ah yes, Sweden. Halfway through the first European tour, they were showing signs of acute decay. Shane had grown pale and gaunt while practicing something called “Sensual Asceticism,” which the rest of the planet called white powder, pussy, and beer; the singer had long since ditched the basics of hygiene in order to become more connected to his “natural aura,” and his band nickname had become Operation Shock and Awful. Adam was in the middle of a month of enforced silence, because, as he’d scribbled to the other Blood Orphans, “my energies need to be recirculated back into me, and then thrust forward through my guitar. Also no one listens to a thing I say.” Darlo had contracted crabs, and Bobby had ballooned from all the backstage deli plates and chests of beer. He’d also grown a red beard, and his nickname had been changed from Ovary to Gimli.

  Changes in nicknames kept everything fresh and new.

  Joey had been in Los Angeles during the first few tours. With Blood Orphans as her not-so-slowly depreciating leverage, she’d formed her management company, DreamDare, and spent her days trying to get record deals for the other three acts under her wing. Success eluded her, however, and after several months of smashing her head against the hard rock, she’d flown to Stockholm, thrilled to be part of the gang once again. But when she walked into the dressing room, her heart sank.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “You guys look like shit.”

  Darlo had been running toward Joey with the most loving embrace-to-be. But the dressing room was so big that somewhere en route her words sank in, and by the time he reached the manager, his love was gone, and he body-checked her into a table full of food, covering her Stuart-plaid Vivienne Westwood suit in herring salad.

  It was like the general coming down to the front lines and complaining about the mud. And the general was a fucking girl.

  “I have crotch rot!” Darlo cried. “How’s the Jacuzzi?”

  The entire world had not yet gotten the memo that Blood Orphans was radioactive. In a place like Sweden, there was a five-month lag for such memos to fly the length of the zeitgeist. So the band was running on the final fumes of the Warners European marketing machine, reflected in a) the size of the club they were playing, which was almost a theater, b) the guarantee, which was still informed by some actual booking agent muscle, and c) the packed room of young blond kids, including a not insignificant number of completely shit-hot, very tall, twenty-one-year-old girls.

  Joey had introduced the band, just like old times, but the carny-circus-show-barker routine resonated not one bit with the Swedes. To them, she was just some American in a herring-salad-stained suit who spoke loudly and made stupid promises, like her president. They stared and booed. Someone screamed “Nazi oil thugs, go home!” Joey ranted like the Big Bopper, Robin Williams, and Huey Long cramped into one Drew Barrymore-esque tart from the San Fernando Valley, and knew, for the first time since Blood Orphans had been born, that she had wildly overestimated her charm.

  The band sauntered onstage. Shane had really become the anti-Shane by this point, without any semblance of the earnest and sweet New Fundamentalist Baptist Church parishioner. Now he was just an emaciated waif wearing torn cotton, grade-Z leather, and eye shadow.

  He looked out from sad, underfed, forsaken eyes.

  “Good evening, tall Swedish people,” he said. “We’re Blood Orphans and we do not support the war in Iraq. In fact, we agree with you that it is the most craven act yet from an already craven, power-drunk administration. We want to make that clear. I want to make that clear. For it is most certainly written, in the religion that I grew up in, Christianity, that one must respect all races and faiths, and …”

  The band had started to play over him, a midtempo number called “Landing Strip Blues (’Taint What You Think),” a common tactic the other three used to get Shane to stop his monologues. Sometimes they had to cycle the same opening of a song for ten minutes, until Shane grew bored and caught the boat as it came round, segueing into the vocals. But that night Gandhi just kept talking.

  “I mean, I grew up in a microeconomy of armaments, in Orange C
ounty, and my dad was an engineer at Lockheed. You guys don’t understand what it’s like to, uh, grow up in that kind of military-industrial shadow complex, because your government doesn’t actually sell weapons. I mean, I don’t know what the main industry is here, besides snow and hot blondes, but …”

  Joey stood behind the stage, horrified. Adam and Bobby stood in their corners, statues in this torture garden, and cycled the chord progression. Darlo bared his teeth. Every time they came around for the verse to start, he would count out, as if a little orientation were all Shane needed. But Preacher Shane’s train kept a-rollin’.

  “Certainly in books I’ve been reading, like the Kama Sutra and The Seventeen Storey Mountain, wait, I mean Seven Storey Mountain, issues of peace are first off the most important. That’s what good books teach, peace. Any of you girls down here want to show me your idea of peace? But I’m serious, I’m just as upset as you with the war. It’s so lame. You know. Uh. Maybe it is Seventeen Storey Mountain.”

  Joey watched the Swedish kids start to fume. Darlo chucked a drumstick at Shane, but it missed and ricocheted into the face of some girl in the front row. She yelped and dropped, and that got Shane on board. He jumped in like a bargain-basement Jerry Lee Lewis:

  It’s the big uh-huh ah-ha! the part between the yin and

  the yang.

  It’s kind of sweet, it’s got a precious tang.

  I go down there to read between the lines,

  When I’m on my way to that sweet meaty bee-hind.

  I heard about it from a cool cool gal,

  She had a brother named Six-Dinner Sal.

  Forsooth! she said, Go now and taste that plunder.

  Don’t be a Johnny-one-note when you’re down under!