Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  When Darlo was sixteen, he’d stolen his father’s baseball card collection. He’d stolen the collection because the old bag had hit on Jenni Feingold, his girlfriend from next door, whom he thought he might love. Jenni kept it quiet, but then David Cox ran into Aavram Feingold over at Canter’s and told him all about it.

  “You oughta look out,” he said, chugging a Cel-Ray soda. “I might have to tap that ass.”

  Consequently, Jenni’s parents forbade her to see Darlo. He and Jenni had to sneak around. She was never really the same with him.

  “I only told him an obvious truth,” Cox said. “They ought to be proud their daughter’s such a little fox. What’s the big deal?”

  In retaliation, Darlo stole the cards, burned them on the lawn, and left the ashes. Several hundred bits of cardboard, valued at over five thousand dollars, reduced to charred mold. But price was nothing. The cards were Daddy Cox’s visa back into childhood. Now that visa had been revoked. Now he was cut off from any and all palimpsests of innocence.

  “You son of a bitch!” he said, and cuffed Darlo’s ear.

  “You’re a fucking scumbag!” Darlo replied, and punched his father in his fat nose. “A pedophile!”

  Darlo figured that was it. The man never stayed angry at his son. His son was all. But when Darlo came home from school the next day, Abby, the most ferocious of the Rhodesian Ridgebacks, was waiting for him.

  Abby was stone-cold insane. Darlo’s dad used her in the dogfight ring he and his fellow pornographers and hoodlums held out at the Malibu estate of Bon Charles, the burgeoning king of American bukkake.

  Abby had been brought up to kill. David Cox kept her separate from the other dogs, fed her red meat and cow brains, and deprived her of any affection whatsoever. So he let Abby out to teach Darlo a lesson.

  She charged Darlo, threw him down, and planted her teeth in his side. Darlo ripped at her eyes, punched at her face. The dog ran around the property screaming. She banged into trees and tripped over herself. Darlo went into the house, got his grandfather’s service revolver — a gift that Darlo’s dad had protested — and shot Abby through the temple. He held the blinded dog down, crying an apology, drooling an apology as his hands went red, and put three bullets in her head.

  He threw up on the patio, then wandered over to Jenni Feingold’s house, weeping, blood running down his side. Her father answered the door to find him sprawled out, stained crimson, unconscious.

  But underneath the trauma, in some hidden fold of his soul, Darlo had expected his dad to retaliate. This was just the way life was. Some part of him never even flinched. Some part of him respected his dad’s actions.

  Every time he looked in a mirror, he saw the toothmarks above his waist. Sixteen stitches. Another bite or two and the dog would have taken a kidney, plucked it right out with that vise grip.

  When he told Joey about the incident years back, she had not been impressed.

  “Siccing a dog on your fucking son is a Saddam Hussein kind of nuts,” she’d said, throwing down a shot of Cuervo at a Westwood strip club. “It’s a Pol Pot kind of nuts.”

  “You don’t understand. My dad’s been good to me.”

  “No. Wrong. Now take that shot, pussy.”

  Down there, in his soul, that tight part of him had cried out. Up here, Pretend Land. No Big Deal Land. On the green of Museumplein, the trustafarian blathered on and on.

  Joey stamped out her cigarette. “Fuck you,” she said, and rushed into the crowd.

  More cheers came up. Some hot piece of milky-white Dutch ass walked by, and Darlo remembered that he hadn’t fucked anything today except his hand. A deep throb rose in his chest, and under normal circumstances he would have followed after, hit on her, capitalized on his distinct feral charms. But those charms were MIA, and besides, he was too busy thinking about the coke in the cupboard, the Adderall in the attic, the Vicodin in the vestibule.

  The police would find it for sure. They would bust his dad some more. They couldn’t link it back to him. There was no receipt on the shit. So let them tag the old man with his son’s cache. Served him right.

  His loyalty to the paterfamilias loosened up a little, an airtight seal losing pressure, an engine without enough compression.

  His dad was at home, probably, celebrating his arraignment by sport-fucking a bunch of eighteen-year-olds. He would get in all his fresh talent, call a bunch of his scumbag underworld friends, pepper the girls with cocaine and crystal — Darlo’s, probably, found nestled in the DVD collection in the screening room — and just line ’em up. After the first round in the living room, he’d follow the routine and take them down to the basement, press the code on the keypad behind the bookshelf — 664, the neighbor of the beast — and open the secret door to the fun-guy dungeon, the S&M cellar, with the hoses and the clamps and the rubber bats, and make service animals out of them.

  They’d think it was all fun and games at first, but at some juncture, watching the arc of men’s spanking hands change as they moved through the air on the way to their asses, their wet lips would go crooked with fear. Their doll’s eyes would tighten in their heads. They would panic and scream. Stupid girls. Naive girls. Didn’t everyone know that David Cox was a sick old fuck who had done everything but make snuff? Didn’t they know that he liked to draw blood and twist back arms over the warm leatherette and the olde-tyme rack?

  Darlo pretended that his father hurt no one, that the man was only kink and fetish, feathers and hot wax. But screams came up from the cellar like bad smells.

  He ignored the screams. Night after night month after month year after year. He smoked, drank, snorted, fucked himself into a cloudy stupor so the screams would go soft, sound like birds singing in April.

  But one time he had not been able to make the sound go soft. The sound had cut through the stoned haze, cut through the floor, the ceiling, the door.

  So he went down there, because the screaming was making him bite his lips, making him draw blood.

  He went down there and found his father and a few other men with thick necks and silver watches taking turns with a tied-up girl. Sitting on couches, sweaty, they were naked but for their jewels and rings. The girl was bent over some kind of leather pommel horse. She was bleeding and crying. They were laughing.

  “Stop, Dad,” Darlo said. “Stop now, you sick fuck, or I’ll call the cops.”

  His dad was in a leather mask, a whip in one hand, his hard cock in the other. He stared through his son.

  “Oh, come on!” one of the men said, lighting up a cigar. “Come on, Darlo, don’t spoil the fun!”

  Mascara ran down the girl’s face. She was so scared she shook; drool hung from her mouth. Darlo untied her. She blubbered and moaned and held on to him. She moaned in thanks. She gripped his arm. Blood ran from her.

  Darlo surprised himself with nausea.

  “She wanted to do it,” his dad said, scratching his wet balls. “Don’t be such a killjoy.”

  She held on to Darlo. Moist walls, old man stink, jazz on the stereo accentuating the lies. Didn’t jazz always accentuate the lies in a room?

  “Help me,” she said. “Please help me.”

  She bled all over her body. Darlo saw the story. Blood ran down her leg, drying on the way. He barely kept his dinner down.

  “Please,” she said.

  Darlo grabbed his father by the neck. He grabbed his father and squeezed as hard as he could. The girl ran, screaming.

  “I’ll fucking kill you,” he said, and punched his father in the eye. Punched him hard enough to burst a bunch of capillaries. Punched him hard enough to break two bones in the man’s face.

  There were things people could never know.

  He broke the old man’s left zygomatic and maxilla. But all Darlo knew was the fat crunch under the girl’s screams and the jazz.

  And out in the world, aboveground, people thought he was a piece of shit. They thought Darlo Cox was bluster and meanness and selfishness, the sex addict, inhaler of
alcohol, a regular ripper. All they saw was one side.

  But there are two sides. There is night and day, and everyone is at a different latitude. Darlo’s latitude was way up north. In Darlo’s genetic code, there was one hour of light in the day. He barely made it over the horizon, but in that hour he shot up, burned as bright as anyone else. He burned with jealousy of those whose sun rises high in their sky, whose emotions are not tethered by that fixed point, whose light also gives heat.

  Darlo had punched his father’s face. He had risen over the horizon so his light shone, and he broke bones. He had attacked the man who tried to restrain the girl. He had grabbed the man’s balls and squeezed until the man made the sound of air escaping through ice.

  “Help me!” the girl screamed, and ran out the door, up the stairs.

  Darlo ran after her. She hid from him in the kitchen.

  “It’s OK,” he said. “Hey!”

  But then he heard yelling from the dungeon, stomping up the stairs.

  He ran to the stairs and met two dudes. “Darlo!” they yelled. “You fuckin’ —”

  Darlo barreled into them and they fell down against each other, still yelling. Behind him, he heard running and the slam of the door. By the time he was out on the street, she was gone.

  A naked girl, gone? A naked barefoot girl, gone?

  “It’s OK!” he shouted into the trees, into the canyon. Wind and dirt. “It’s OK — I’ll help you!”

  He knew he heard breathing.

  “I’m not one of them. He’s disgusting!”

  Nausea up in him. The house shaking. The house crumbling.

  “Not one of them I’ll help you not one of them!”

  Sick on the ground. All of him rushing to escape. His light struggling to stay over the horizon.

  “Not one of them!”

  On the ground. He heard her crying, but too late. He was on the ground, shoveling it all out of him. But the sun was sinking. His ancestral gravity dragged the sun down.

  “Not one of not one of them notoneofthemnot!”

  A protester shoved him. Darlo’s feet were numb. He almost fell over. Joey was up near the podium. Her head bobbed as if she were moshing.

  What would his mother say to all of this?

  “Come back to the open spaces,” she’d written. “The vastness of the land cleans the soul.”

  A lasso in midair, spinning.

  “The land lets a person breathe. The land connects you with the benevolent forces of grace.”

  What separates the old man and me? Give me something to separate us. I don’t torture. I don’t hurt.

  The differences felt like small ones. The differences felt like abstractions.

  How could he push his sun higher into the sky? How could he escape that ancestral gravity?

  He hung his head, daunted by the sense of impossibility. He needed that Iridium phone again. He had to stop it from happening.

  Joey was in the crowd, head bobbing, arms flailing. Space opened around her.

  He needed to get Jesse over to Chez Cox. Logistics and plans. See what Jesse can do. Jesse, you owe me.

  The manager had the black hair of some girl in her hands, and it looked like the two were dancing on mud.

  Darlo pushed through to her. He experienced a clarity of seriousness, the need to protect, and lunged forward into the fracas.

  The man on the podium pointed at Joey like a hunter.

  “Get off of me!” the girl screamed.

  Darlo threw people aside and grabbed Joey’s wrist and bit it.

  “Fuck!” Joey said, and lost her grip so the girl pulled free.

  “Babe!” Darlo said. “Babe, what are you doing?”

  Joey looked at him, panicked, like How did I get here?

  “Babe!” Darlo said, and pulled her. “Come on!”

  That was the thing about Euros, Darlo thought. They didn’t put up a fight. Here he and Joey were, two wasted Americans, and all he had to do was shove. All he had to do was stiffen his back, bare his teeth, and they backed off. Darlo stiff-armed and dispersed them like snow under a plow.

  And then he was running. Catching up with the light over the horizon, his light, trying to break that latitude.

  “Darlo!” Joey yelled. “I can’t run!”

  Joey would catch up. Darlo heard the scurrying of the girl through the steep dirt woods of Laurel Canyon.

  “Wait!”

  Darlo was going to catch her. He was going to protect her. Lab rat testing out new feelings.

  “Stop running from me!” he said. “Fucking stop!”

  His dad would be in the dungeon, rosining up the bow. A girl would be there. Some hot little number looking to spread for the living legend of extreme pornography. His stomach lurched.

  How do you feel about pain, baby?

  A nervous shrug, indigenous to girls from small towns. Sweat forming on the lip. A giggle that said, Where am I going, and where have I been?

  Down there, hiding in the canyon, naked.

  Or here, ahead of him, his manager falling behind.

  “Stop!” he said, and ran the memory down.

  16

  JOEY BROKE FREE OF THE CROWD and ran across the green after Darlo, but with her shitty leg she couldn’t keep up.

  “Wait!” she yelled. “Darlo!”

  Darlo ran through traffic, whooping, yelling his way through all those polite faces. He turned back.

  “Come on!” he yelled, and ran on, promising all kinds of whoop-ass to the crowd of formally placid, constructive, client-state Dutchies. “You wanna hit me, Mr. Car? You want a piece of this? I’ll fucking rip your throats, you dumb fucks!”

  Joey ran after him, her leg working better than it had a right to, and she thought it was funny that no one chased after them. Try to rip out some girl’s hair and suffer no consequences? She looked back; the crowd swarmed in on itself, as if the two Americans were hiding in the throng. The effigy of George Bush flopped in the wind like something you see on the top of a used-car lot.

  Darlo disappeared from view and she tried to pick up the pace, yelling for him to stop. She hadn’t been this out of breath since she’d had that threesome with the two interns from Rolling Stone.

  Clouds turned over and over in the sky, shapes wrestling, tumbling.

  Darlo stood at an intersection like a mad, tweaked-up mouse in a maze, smelling for the right direction. He saw her hobbling toward him. His hair lay in a greasy mop, and he laughed, exhilarated. She couldn’t help but hear strings as she slouched toward him.

  “Fredericks!” he yelled, panting. “Holy shit! What the fuck was that?”

  “Gonna fucking kill someone or something!”

  “Fucking Dutch!”

  “Praise it!” she yelled. “Sing it!”

  They laughed like they were back in the Spaceland bar, the world spread before them, happenstance and skill throwing elbows for bragging rights at the helm of their ship. Laughing, two friends at the dawn of their reign, having just lit a fresh wick on their explosive, dynamic future. Laughing, and Joey heard the joyous howl of introductions in a hundred sold-out arenas.

  Can you hear me, San Francisco?

  Blood Orphans!

  Can you hear me, New York?

  Blood Orphans!

  Can you hear me, Los Angeles? At the back of the arena, way back there in the nosebleed seats, we love you, Los Angeles, can you hear me?

  Blood Orphans!

  Their name in pulsing lights above them, huge lights pulsing their name.

  Blood … Orphans … Blood … Orphans.

  Laughing like it was all to be just … like … that.

  “What the fuck, babe!” Darlo yelled, smile wide as the Nile. “Trying to get us killed!”

  “Fuck them!” she said. “Bitching and moaning like record company publicists! An army of them right there. Every face like a fucking Steadman.” She growled. “Fucking Steadmans, the whole bunch of them.”

  Darlo shook his head. “You’ve lost
it. Lost it!”

  “I have lost it. Absolutely goddamned right.”

  Darlo looked up. Joey saw watery eyes.

  “I love you, Joey,” he said.

  Oh, no. That was dewy. Dewy eyes.

  “I really love you,” he said, and inhaled.

  What she wondered was, How did this never happen before? How could we go years without Darlo going dewy?

  “Don’t be a fag!” she yelled, and massaged her ankle.

  His face went dark. “Bitch,” he said, “I mean it!” And then he went running off again.

  “Darlo!” she yelled, and hobbled after him. “No, come on!”

  Darlo ran like he had a thousand volts up his ass, bolting by all the old buildings, all the fashionable Dutch youth, all the protesting Euro complainistas.

  “Darlo!” she yelled, limping, pathetic. “I’m sorry!”

  Back in the halcyon days, they’d raced down the beach at Venice like two boxers in training, right along the shore, laughing at the freaks and turds, the waste cases, the whole throng of those born without the gene of opportunity in them. Joey would run along that beach and think, That’s right, I am running right the fuck by you, I am leaving you in the rotting dust, I will make something of myself. I won’t be an executive like my dad or a banker like my mother, I won’t be a dentist like Uncle Phil or a philosophy professor at UCLA like Aunt Grace, I won’t be a premed like sister Annie or an engineer like brother Rob, but I will have use, have a point, be a legend.

  Running, leaving them all in the dust. Pacific mist and spray.

  I will be remembered.

  Darlo ran, barreling through the entrance to Vondelpark, plowing right through those few mellow park revelers, over blankets spread out and students reading. Seconds later, Joey came hobbling by, sweating hard, passing a family of four — a man, a woman, and two toddlers — who’d been swamped in the undertow of Darlo’s pure rude-itude, and they looked at her for some explanation as she yelled for her friend like a dog owner who’d let go of the leash.

  “Sorry!” she said. “So sorry!”

  The drummer had straightened out his path, and he ran as if he actually had a destination. And it turned out, he did have a destination, for at the end of the field, as Joey’s leg and ankle started working together to screw her, at the end of the field in the shade of some trees, two skinheads were kicking some helpless dude who appeared, in Joey’s shaky running vision, to be putting up no resistance.