Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  All those girls and their pagan ways. Pleasures of the flesh shining in his eyes like God dust. That was why.

  Forgive me, Gautama, Shane thought, but what a delicious fucking cheeseburger! He sucked ketchup up from deep within the bun.

  A chunk of peanut butter, colored like earwax, dislodged from his hair and fell to the McTray. An old man missing most of his teeth walked by, and Shane, bearing down on reminiscence, felt that mixture of remorse and pride that accompanied the memory of knocking out Bobby’s front tooth in that Charlottesville Super 8.

  “He deserved it,” Shane told his fries. “Not my fault. Stole my Bible.” He unwrapped another cheeseburger. “My fucking Bible.”

  On the first tour, Shane had taken his Extreme Teen Bible — a gift from his pastor, Richard Olmer of the New Fundamentalist Baptist Church of Anaheim — on tour. This was the least Olmer could do, considering that he’d just started his second full-time job counting the hundred grand Shane had just tithed. The singer took the Bible, with its monogrammed leather case and silk bookmark, and placed it prominently in the glove compartment of the band’s brand-new, jet-black V8 Ford Econoline. Well, not entirely new; Darlo’s dad had a film series called Back That Shit Up, which involved men paying women they saw on the street to have sex with them in said van. They’d shot only three scenes when Darlo requisitioned it, and he wasn’t about to let Bibles hang out in the glove compartment.

  “That’s where cigarettes and maps go,” the drummer said. “And besides, no one wants to see it. The rest of us are Satanists. So put it in your fucking backpack.”

  “Have you ever thought,” Shane said, “that the Bible is my map?”

  “Priceless,” Bobby said, and cracked open a can of Black Label. “Here’s to you, loser.”

  Shane had expected Darlo to be his scourge on tour, but instead he and Bobby developed an inexplicable negative chemistry. When Bobby did his neurotic worry-wart routine, scratching at his hands and complaining about every little thing down to the amount of fizz in his soda, Shane felt like something was picking at the inside of his head. He prayed for understanding, but that didn’t work; the fact was, he’d been too busy fucking girls whose last names went unsaid to have much time to pray.

  With rare exception, Bobby drove, and every time he came upon the Extreme Teen Bible in the search for maps or Marlboros, he’d chuck it to the back. Shane would say nothing and put the Good Book back the first chance he got. This was the standard routine for the entire six weeks of their first tour.

  Then one day the Extreme Teen Bible was gone.

  “I left it right here,” Shane said, tapping the glove box. “Give it back, Bobby.”

  “I didn’t touch your fucking precious Bible,” Bobby said as they passed through the industrial Jersey swamps, through the American fens. “Christ.”

  “That Bible was a present from my pastor,” he said. “Please give it back.”

  “The pastor you gave away your entire advance to?”

  “That was supposed to be a secret.”

  Darlo laughed. “Bono says a secret is something you tell one other person,” he said, and snapped his copy of Hustler back in place. “What an interesting article I’m reading.”

  Bobby adjusted the AC. “That book’s a mockery of Christianity,” he said, and broke into an imitation of the book’s cadence, in the vein of a used-car salesman. “Hey, boys and girls, do you know what Jesus said about forgiveness? He said it was way rad! Isn’t that extreme? Isn’t that just totally awesome? Jesus plays guitar better than Hendrix. Jesus makes the very sweetest chocolate cake. Jesus has a better jumpshot than Michael Jordan, and he makes Aristotle look like a copycat. Jesus is so cool!”

  In truth, Shane was starting to be not so into the Christian thing. Really, this was about him and Bobby. But he wasn’t going to let on. Matters of principle were at stake.

  “Mock all you want,” he said. “That book’s important to me, and I want it back, you faithless jerk.”

  Shane knew Bobby had that Bible; however ephemerally it currently fit into his daily life of thoughtless sex, that Bible was the wall separating him from the amoral compass of Darlo and Bobby and Joey, and he wanted it around.

  Adam wasn’t involved; he was too busy sketching in his notebook, speaking in a whisper, and playing the guitar like Kirk Hammett. To Shane he wasn’t there most of the time.

  “Give me the Bible back” became the normal breakfast conversation.

  “Repent, sinner” became the normal breakfast reply.

  Then, a week later, in a Charlottesville Super 8, he found two pages of the Gospel of St. John on the door of his room, with the words Eat Me written in marker across its hallowed pages. When Bobby opened his door, Shane, suffering from irritable bowels and so already short-leashed, attacked.

  “You piece of shit!” he yelled, and shoved the bass player back into his room. “Give it back!”

  Then he saw the book on the bed in pieces. Bobby had ripped out more than a few extreme pages; paper was strewn all over the room. The leather coverlet peeked out from under a sheet, hiding until the coast was clear.

  Bobby smirked and cracked open a can of Black Label. “Adam was talking last night about some artist who did this,” he said. “Some idea about the inner meaning of the text, the poetry of cut and paste. Thought I’d try it myself.” He glugged some beer. “What do you think?”

  Shane threw a sharp jab and knocked out one of Bobby’s front teeth.

  Though punching someone in the face wasn’t exactly his area of expertise, Shane immediately knew he’d connected. When he felt the tooth go, right on his middle finger, he had the same sensation as sliding his cock into a warm, wet, welcoming pussy. He went rock-solid, standing there breathless as Bobby fell to the floor, clutching his face.

  “Son of a bitch,” the bass player yelled, writhing as blood streamed from between his fingers. “Oh my God!”

  Picking at the crusts of his final cheeseburger, Shane reflected on the incident, a marker of epochs come and gone. He had always gloated that Bobby had never been the same, but now he knew that he too had been changed in full by that action, and not for the better. When he saw Bobby’s front tooth lying on the dirty Super 8 carpet, he should have thought, I’ve become lost. But what he thought was, Serves you right, prick. If Bobby hadn’t been bleeding so badly, he would have hit him again. Looking at it now, the Extreme Teen Bible seemed more like a coloring book than anything else, but that didn’t change the utter sacrilege of the act, the downright insult.

  Losing his tooth had really broken Bobby’s demon dam. The smirk on the bass player’s face just before Shane clocked him was a smirk Shane hadn’t seen in at least three tours. Until his tooth went flying across the Super 8 carpet, Bobby had been an edgy but happy-go-lucky guy. Not long after, his hands turned to shit, Darlo started fucking every girl he wanted, and his questionable utility onstage disappeared altogether.

  The Buddha taught love. Jesus taught love. But something about Bobby was beyond Shane’s grasp of love. Something about the way he smelled. Like pears turning.

  Shane’s method of self-forgiveness was to imagine them meeting years later in a neutral space — say, at Adam’s wedding, to celebrate the guitar player’s discovery of his perfect sensitive fairy-girl. Like other great rock bands who have broken up — the Police, the Faces, three members of the Beatles — they would do a ceremonial onstage reunion jam, and he would find all of Bobby’s habits and tics endearing: how he stuck out his lower lip when excited, how he bounced in his seat every time Soundgarden came on the radio, and even the way he played the bass, stooped down like he was trying to squeeze one out and eat at the same time.

  Shane wanted to think that the past two years had been part of some deliberate quest. He wanted to believe that everything that had happened, including knocking out Bobby’s tooth, had been a product of his spiritual deliberation. But sitting under the warming lamps of McDonald’s with a gut full of cow meat, he felt like
a leaf blown to and fro on the winds of fate and circumstance, caught in a farce of his making.

  As if he could sit here, peanut butter in his hair, smelling like the back end of a dog and some unnamed Dutch pussy perfume, and claim that he was any better off than the day he had met the other members of the band.

  He needed a shower. He needed help. Joey owed him a thousand hot showers. You bet she did. He ate his burger crusts, sipped the last of his Coke, and dialed the manager.

  10

  SINCE CHILDHOOD, Bobby’s life had been defined by eczema. And considering how many people suffered from the problem, he always thought it surprising how little could be done, how deep this problem ran, hardwired into one’s genetics. Dr. Adler, his pediatrician, had said, “Not my specialty!” and sent him to a dermatologist, Dr. Lawler, who should have given Bobby a punchcard for the amount of business he provided. Time after time he reappeared in Lawler’s office, his mother fretting and disgusted, her shame hanging over the room. His mother, a successful corporate lawyer at Melveney & Meyers, a proud member of the Sherman Oaks PTA, and one hundred percent free of the slightest rough spot on her ring-covered hands. All Lawler could say was, “That’s truly an amazing condition you’ve got, Robert. Truly amazing! Want a lollipop? Want Dodgers tickets?”

  People who lived normal lives would never understand. If you could play basketball, spend ten minutes using a shovel, or help a friend move without having everything you touched feel like sandpaper, you had no clue.

  As Bobby grew older, his eczema improved enough for him to take up the bass. His real desire was to play the drums, but his hands were too wrecked to build up the proper calluses. Those years, in retrospect, seemed a golden age, without his cracked jelly-skin as the organizing principle of his life.

  That golden age ended the day he signed that contract with Warners and imagined his cut in the mail, a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars. And his hands began to itch, ever so faintly, like the first cricket singing of the coming evening outside your twilit window. By the time Blood Orphans hit the road, his hands were inflamed, and soon went from private annoyance to public problem. People started noticing — Carson Daly, for instance, when they played his show. Daly was walking around meeting all of them as they soundchecked. Then he shook Bobby’s hand and his eyes went wide.

  “That’s looking pretty rough,” Daly said. “What’s that all about?”

  “Gangrene,” Bobby replied, and squeezed harder.

  Shane punching his tooth out had proved some kind of dermal event horizon, and the rot had set in hard; for relief, Bobby would run the shower to scalding and stick his hands under. The burn was so lovely, so rounded and complete, that his body shook, a direct line to a twisted joy; the burn uncovered some hidden happy nerve as his lips quivered with a paralytic grin. During this ritual, he thought of the descriptions of heroin’s rush through your body. The scalding water was alchemy, transmuting the base metals of his pedestrian pain into pure pleasure gold.

  This habit also peeled his hands raw, and thus the Mummy was born, its shadow rising high over the terrain of their third U.S. tour, their trek across America in winter. Snow, sleet, and decomposing fingers.

  “I’m recovering from an accident,” he would tell girls at shows. “It’s a long, horrible story.”

  Responses varied.

  “You poor thing!”

  “That’s awful!”

  “I know something that would help!”

  “Does Darlo have a girlfriend?”

  His scarce musical abilities went south. No more attempts at being fancy or melodic. Now he had to imitate Michael Anthony, Van Halen’s bass player, the king of the root note. Michael Anthony had made a career out of playing the simplest parts this side of incompetence, and so could Bobby. That was fine with the rest of the band. Adam’s playing was chock-full of the swells and screams of his pedalboard, Darlo’s drumming was busy and loud, like a poor man’s John Bonham, and Shane’s Steven-Tyler-meets-Justin-Timberlake routine filled the rest of the spaces, his voice a blurred Technicolor to the musical two-tone. No one noticed that Bobby wasn’t doing anything.

  Anyway, he wasn’t a very good bass player, so he didn’t really mind. Oh, no one ever said, not even once, You’re the band passenger, but he knew. Using the P-word out loud was the utter humiliation, though. He dreaded it every time he fucked up a take, or stifled Adam’s solos by switching to the wrong key, or ran over Shane’s voice with a mangled part. Actually, ruining Shane’s whiny flow was the only silver lining of his condition that he could find.

  Well, there was one other thing: when people saw the crud, they feared you. They wouldn’t want to run the risk of getting too close to what looked like a flesh-eating virus. At the mess in Sweden, Bobby’d had the pleasure of rubbing his hands all over the faces of a great many shrieking blond kids.

  But here was this sweet girl, sweet Sarah Van der Hoff, with her full lips and pale blue eyes and hot elfin curves. Here was his guardian angel in her henna-red tresses, wearing those fishnets, sporting that ridiculous Nine Inch Nails tattoo on her arm, escorting him around the foggy city.

  “Have you ever been to Burning Man?” she asked. “I so want to go!”

  European girls always had the cutest naïveté.

  “Burning Man is pretty silly now,” he said. “It’s so commercial.”

  “It sounds beautiful to me,” she said, and skipped along. “I’d love to, you know, screw in the desert. So natural. Kissed by the sun.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  Bobby always had trouble with silence when it came to girls. Silence felt like a loss of momentum.

  “We might record our next record out in the desert,” he said. He had never spoken of the next record, never really pondered it. “One of the guys from Queens of the Stone Age has a studio out there, and he said we could record any time we wanted.”

  “I like Queen,” she said. “Freddie Mercury is so great.”

  “No, Queens of the Stone Age,” he said, starting to jog along to keep up with her skipping. She was a little sprite, all right. Her body, a sinuous little piece, was built for speed, not comfort. Bobby thought about all that red hair going up and down on his crotch, then chastised himself, then quit thinking about anything because she was skipping even faster.

  “Could you slow down?” he asked.

  She laughed. “Come on, Bobby. We’re almost there!”

  She skipped as if she were on one of those airport conveyor belts, and he barely kept up, thinking about the time in St. Louis when he had chased a Goth brunette with big tits and a clit ring all over the room of a Motel 6, while Darlo threw up next door after losing a drinking contest with some old biker. That had been an event of supreme satisfaction.

  They stopped at a corner. A tram lumbered by. She stole a glance at his hands.

  “I saw that.”

  “Sorry.” She sashayed a little and took one of the mitts in her gentle palms. “Don’t be mad, but I don’t know why it doesn’t make me sick.”

  Bobby stared into her eyes and thought, She must not meet Darlo.

  “Come on,” she said, “Dr. Guttfriend is waiting for us.”

  They passed a man lying on the sidewalk, a young man, strung out, who looked just enough like Shane to fill him with glee. He imagined the singer, dead on the concrete, mouth open and filling with flies, Captain Condescending Christian Buddhist Fuckwit being eaten alive by minions of Satan.

  Sarah stopped in front of a modern-looking building, the kind that in America would have been a constant target of mockery.

  “We’re here,” she said.

  Dr. Guttfriend’s office ghost-smelled of baby vomit, despite the fact that it was germ-freak clean. Toys were neatly stacked, and the white walls were covered with images of the smiling toddlers of socialized medicine.

  “Is he a children’s doctor or something?” Bobby asked.

  She nodded.

  “How are old are you, Sarah?”

/>   “I’ll be nineteen on December fifth.” She made a face. “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-six. I was just making sure that you were street-legal.”

  Her brow tightened. She didn’t know what street-legal meant, but she sure knew the letchy tone. That tone was global. Every woman recognized it.

  “I’ll let him know we’re here,” she said, and went through a door.

  Stupid ass, Bobby chastised himself. She’s a great girl. She’d never be a Blood Orphans fan. You don’t talk to normal girls like that. Darlo must never fucking meet her.

  He scratched his right hand, loosening the bandages. He scratched and scratched. Stupid guy, you’re so fucking stupid. Always say the stupid thing. Always have to ruin everything. Some bandages detached, flapping like untethered sails in choppy water. Fucking stupid jerk. Ruin everything stupid fucking band never going home ever it’ll never end oh fuck that feels so fuck-ing g-good —

  “Hey, stop,” Sarah said, and grabbed his hands. “Stop, Bobby. He’s ready. Let’s go in.”

  Dr. Guttfriend looked like Mr. Rogers with a big bushy Euro tache. He stuck out his hand, and then he saw what he was dealing with and put the hand on Bobby’s shoulder. His face contracted just a touch. Even doctors, Bobby thought. Even fucking doctors.

  In the examination room, Guttfriend tried to make small talk but stared at Bobby’s hands like they were the missing dermatologic link.

  “Eczema, eczema,” the good doctor said like an incantation, putting his hand to his chin in a thoughtful pose. “Such a mysterious ailment. How long have you had …”

  He gingerly took one of Bobby’s hands in his, then said something in Dutch a few times.

  “Sorry, I don’t speak Dutch,” Bobby said. “What are you saying?”

  Guttfriend looked at Sarah, like, Where have you been trolling, little girl?

  She said something in Dutch, and Guttfriend smiled at Bobby.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Please, go on.”