“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.
“Take your smallest motivation and inflate it,” Samuels had said, eyes glued on that coed ass. “Make it epic. Find the epic kernel.”
Adam drew wrinkles on the four of them. He tipped a hat on Darlo’s head, drew mustaches, laid a heavy aspect on the eyes.
“Find the epic that lies in your most mundane obsession.”
He put more facial hair on Shane. He drew Bobby in such a way that his right hand touched his chin, revealing flickers of dry skin. All of them appeared sallow-skinned, drunk with mead, scurvy-bound. His phone rang.
“Hi, Shane.”
“Hey, what’s up, man?”
He counted to three, to purge all niceness from his voice. “What is it?”
“Do you know where Joey’s staying? Fucker told me, but I didn’t have a pen and I forgot what she said.”
He shadowed some capes on the four of them, then realized he had to make room for Joey. Would he paint her in milkmaid dress, or as the head mayor? He added more hair to Shane’s beard.
“Adam?”
“Oh, sorry, you faded out there. Hold on and I’ll get the info.”
He put his cell phone down and started counting to one hundred. A shiver of excitement went through him.
“Hello?” came the voice on the phone, faceup on the ground. “Adam?”
He picked the phone back up. “Here it is. The Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky. Near Dam Square. You know how to get there?”
“I’ll find it,” Shane said, the line crackling. “Everything’s going wrong today. But some days I guess the pilgrimage is rough.”
Smoke rose from the park. Cheering rose higher. He dropped the phone and sketched out Joey in burgher dress, looming over them, the head of the landowners. Her blond hair peeked out the sides of her tall black hat.
Adam tried to map his narcissism onto the scene, the way his instructor had said to do. What element in himself was he ashamed of? How could he apply that to this portrait of the dead, the drunk, the disaffected?
Some issue of perspective clicked in his head. Some relationship became apparent. He drew downward lines in the faces. He sharpened corners on hats. He picked the phone up again because Shane was yelling for him.
“I’m here. What is it?”
“Just want to say thanks,” the singer said. “Thanks, man. Thanks a lot.”
What was that weird semitone hidden in Shane’s voice?
Regret.
“You’re welcome.”
He made the hairs on Shane’s face sharp, pointy, a touch of the porcupine.
“Hey,” Shane said. “I’m sorry about last night. We’re just so mean to you. We’re always picking on —”
Adam hung up on him. Shane apologizing was just another off-key moment in their song of failed connection. Not today. He stretched his velvet-trousered legs.
He tried to keep sketching, but the magic was gone. The moment of pure synthesis, as Instructor Samuels called it, had abandoned him. But soon he would have all the time in the world to channel the synthetic moment. Soon he would be able to sit on the sand at Venice and let the natural world bring the synthesis of this disparate world to him. He closed his eyes and imagined the beach again, cool and calm. This time he was on the Oregon coastline. Seastacks blocked out the sun. He was alone and reaching for the pure synthetic moment. He was free.
And that was when he heard the yelling. He closed his eyes, trying to keep the dream alive, but rough voices cut through like solvent into grease. The two skinheads were walking across the field toward him.
Maybe they weren’t. What would they want out of him? But then he remembered that he was a poncy little rock musician, in his leather jacket and spiky black hair and motorcycle boots. Then he remembered the Fu Manchu.
They pointed at him like they’d finally found their man.
“Dutch, dutch, da-du-dutch dutch!” they said. “Dutch da-dutch, ausländer!”
In their open green flight jackets and suspenders and T-shirts with swastikas, they were just too ridiculous. They couldn’t be real.
“Dutch, da-dutch, ausländer!” said the other one. “Ausländer, Dutch!”
Bad acne scarred one of them, deep like a carved-out delta. Anyone with acne scars that bad would be pretty pissed off.
“Dutch, dutch, Juden!” the other one said. He did not have acne but was the kind of short that passes the true threshold of utter shortitude, like five-three maybe. He had a body like a bulldog’s, and his blue eyes were on fire.
Studying them carefully staved o
ff fear for a few seconds — the stubborn dispassion of the artist — but soon Adam’s body felt as if it were sinking into rapidly hardening goo. “What’s the problem?” he said, which might have been the least tough thing he could have said.
“Ausländer dutch-dutch Juden!” said Pizza Face, and raised his hands like Godzilla.
He waited for them to vaporize. He had fallen asleep and this was a nightmare, brought on by a shallow nodding-out.
Pizza Face grabbed Adam’s backpack and shook it, pointing, as if to say, Look what you’ve brought into this country. Look at the filthy backpack with which you are defiling the pure, undecadent backpacks of Holland.
Images of past harassments began to overlap each other like misaligned transparencies; the hands of his two brothers, Ike and Dave, who would come to him while he was drawing out in the yard, pick up his stuff, and say, You make us look bad acting like such a faggot. Ike and Dave, who worked on their motorcycles out in the shed and resembled the Hanson brothers. Ike and Dave, who filmed their own porn in the Motel 6 off I-5 and sold it at their demolition derbies, at their pit-bull fights, at their Aryan Nation meetings.
These two casts of characters toppled over each other, slippery and out of sync.
Pizza Face threw the backpack down. Adam went sweaty. His body felt covered in Astroglide.
“Leave me alone,” he peeped.
They looked at each other like maybe they’d heard him wrong. He wanted them to start laughing, to temper the anger with some levity. But these mindless freaks seemed to have no sense of humor whatsoever. They seemed to have hot pokers up their asses and to be sure that Adam had put them there.
“Ausländer!” the short bulldog said, and kicked him.
Adam could see everything, slowing speed down, an endocrine aberration that gave him just a little more time to react, so that instead of getting a steel-toed foot in his face he dodged left and swatted at the leg — swatted, he knew, like a little girl.
Waiting for him on his right was another foot, which got him in the shoulder.
“Stop!” he screamed. “Help!”
He rolled and tried to cover his head, muffling his cries. Some dirt got into his mouth, tasting acidic.
The skinheads were just barking now, punctuating their kicks with grunts.
“Help!” Adam screamed, but his voice disappeared into the ether.
14
STARING INTO THE MASS of protesters, Joey grew increasingly aggro. She just wanted one person to resemble someone who had wronged her, and she’d rush in. The crowd grew, over two hundred strong, exercising their right to hate America.
“Can you call McFadden?” Darlo said. His voice was akin to her father’s waking her up to take out the garbage. “Fucker won’t listen to me.”
“And why would he listen to me?”
“You helped him negotiate our contract.”
Joey gritted her teeth. “That’s some totally different shit from the thing with your dad. I’m not getting involved in that. Besides, the last time I saw him, I called him a fat faggot.”
“You did?” He French-inhaled. “Well, just call him and apologize and then help me —”
Joey held up her hand. “Some things are not cleared up with an apology,” she said. “Some things sting for a while. Like, when you talk to your dad, are you just going to accept an apology from him? No, maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re going to hope that wild dogs eat him slowly. Maybe one of those Rhodesian Ridgebacks of his will freak out on him like Abby freaked out on you.”
“Don’t you ever fucking mention that.”
“He set you up,” Joey said. “He set that dog on you.”
“Shut up.”
“He’s a piece of shit, Darlo. He’s a fucking turd.”
Now, as the crowd roared in the pastoral urban square, Joey pulled her meager suit jacket to her body. A monochromatic blur of sun peeked through the clouds.
“I still think you should have pressed charges,” she said, popping some Tylenol. “Seriously.”
“Nah. Stupid whiny thing to do.”
“He sicced a killer dog on you because you sold a few of his baseball cards.” She stepped closer to him. “It’s in the way you walk. You limp a little.”
“You’re one to talk.”
“I was hit by a car.”
Darlo lit another cigarette. His fingers shook. But she knew he couldn’t let it out. That would break him.
“Victims whine, babe,” he said. “I’m not a victim.”
Darlo’s voice went a little flat; the flatness encompassed so much to Joey that was lost in his life, her life. She wanted to take his face in her hands and kiss him gently, coax him from where he hid, but she couldn’t get around her wall of worry about balances of power. Anger at her own inabilities tightened her spine, and now the faces of the crowd became those of the Warners publicity department, the army of young hipster women who had ignored the record to death, the same women who would come into Spaceland and expect Joey to give them free drinks because they shilled for the label. What had happened to the Blood Orphans street team they’d been promised, an army of college reps in Blood Orphans T-shirts, distributing CDs on every college quad in America. Where were those T-shirts now?
Ah yes, the publicity department, which greeted every inquiry as if it were a hot pebble up their collective ass, despite all assurances from Steadman that everyone was lined up, geared to go, ready to roll. Every call greeted with stony indifference or snobby disgust.
Did they think she enjoyed eating shit?
“What can I do?” Steadman said the day after Aerosmith dropped them from the bill. Joey had stormed — well, tried to storm; she wasn’t really tall enough — into his office in her café au lait Gucci knee boots and matching suede suit from Nudies, demanding justice.
“The racist tag kind of ties a hand or two,” he said. “It’s a millstone around the label’s neck.” He lit a cigar. “Don’t you think?”
“Like you don’t know the editor of fucking Spin!”
“He’s a very independent man. He serves bigger masters than me.” He smiled. Like that smile was going to make anything better.
“We can’t get the booking agent on the phone!” Joey said.
“You’re the manager!” He puffed on a Cuban cigar. “Not my job, amigo.”
Buck-passing slime. And now she saw them all in the crowd; Steadman and his publicity minions, hidden in the fight against the American Century.
“Fuck you!” she screamed, pushing forward. She charged at the mass of them, began to climb onto the backs of the progeny of the burghers and traders, low-country smarmy shits, namby-pamby pacifists, but some high-octane patchouli choked her up. She hated patchouli as much as the next person with any self-respect. These passé Euros didn’t even have the integrity to steer clear of that most revolting of scents, which they probably discovered via an American exchange student.
“Hey!” shouted a black-haired English girl in a blue Polartec hoodie. “Hey, get off me!”
Jack Fredericks, Joey’s father, the corporate executive, had laughed and said, That’s what you get for tying your fortunes to a bunch of idiots. That’s what you get for taking your entrepreneurial steam and running a faulty train down broken rails. Joey took a few million dollars and shredded it! Burned it in the pyre of her stupid fucking bad judgment! Got in too deep and drowned! She refused Sharpie Shakes and trusted the wisdom of her unproven hubris.
“My hair! Get off me!”
She remembered the day of the signing. They took pictures and ate a cake in the Warners offices. Drank Lucky Lagers because Lucky was going to sponsor them — another endorsement ruined by racism — to be the official beer of the Blood Orphans (Blood Orphans want you to get Lucky!), and she shoved Steadman’s face in the cake, ha ha, Steadman, you genius!
“Joey!”
She shoved cake into Darlo’s mouth and Shane’s ear and smeared it on Adam’s face and in Bobby’s hair and everyone laughed. Groupies a
nd hangers-on were there like frames on a frilly pastoral picture, like a crocheted Bless This House that goes above a kitchen doorway, girls who had later taken turns with each of them; even Adam couldn’t resist because the rock-and-roll fantasy was real for them and here they were, chosen for it, and Joey had made it happen! The wet lips on their cocks and Joey had made it happen! She had cake in her hands and smiled at the camera in her pink vintage Chanel suit and matching pillbox hat and thought, Next time we’re here I’ll have platinum records in my little hands, plaques of platinum, and we’ll be holding them aloft like the heads of our enemies, medieval warriors come from the land of the ice and snow, all my late-night childhood fantasies fulfilled, Valhalla we are coming —
“Joey!”
Valhalla we are coming.
“Joey!”
Valhalla we are coming.
“Joey!”
15
THE MORE DARLO THOUGHT about it, the more he felt like a sucker. His loyalty, rewarded with a fresh load of trouble. It wasn’t fair that his money was in hock because the old man had gotten sloppy. He thought of the old porn stars who came over for dinner, mournful, pathetic, their bodies wasted by speed, disease, and sorrow. They showed up in their tracksuits and their business-in-front-party-in-the-back haircuts, ate the steak and drank the wine as a windup for the sympathy pitch.
“I need help, Dave,” they’d say, and break down over their sirloin. “I’m in a fucking bad place, man. I fucked it up. You’re all I’ve got.”
His dad would give them a hundred dollars and a hug. “It’s all I’ve got,” he’d say. “My poor brother. It’s all I can do.”
Their faces would contort, gratitude sodomized by disappointment.
And now his dad looked like them. He had a gazillion dollars, but he looked like a husk, a permatanned phantom.
Tax evasion. That was the cute part, and Darlo knew it.
They were in the square now. Some blond trustafarian was on a soapbox, complaining about American guns, germs, and steel.
Joey shot down his bright idea that she should call McFadden and then had to go and mention the time his dad sicced the dogs on him, a memory that was salt rubbed in the wound of his dad’s betrayal.
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