They hovered around him. He tasted iron in his mouth. He’d thought it was sweat.
“What happened?” they asked.
Feelings bubbled up. He started to shake.
“Tell us,” they said, touching him. “Tell us what happened.”
Adam imagined his bandmates burrowing into Amsterdam, hiding from the imminent, impending end. He thought of Shane on the phone, hair matted, head down like a junkie’s; of Bobby, with chopped-up hands and constant doubt; of Darlo, unsatisfiable Darlo, burning from the inside out; of Joey, the fifth Beatle, trying to make it all right, find some restitution for all the mistakes she had made. And finally he saw himself, a murky reflection in the dank, ageless water of his mind’s eye.
He turned around. He swore he heard the Sharpie Shakes jingle. He spun a few times. Sound from a window. Fun in the sun, you betcha.
“What happened?” the people said.
All this time he had held out for the idea that he had made it out of Blood Orphans unchanged, intact, that the rest of them were lost but he was only the wiser for it, that he had carried in his heart a paint of pure calm, one that could be moved over any nasty scene and would coat it with a redemptive sheen.
But he hadn’t avoided it. Blood on his face was proof. His inability to speak his mind was proof. His excessive daily rituals of silence, silence as the only defense against the hourly rush of insult, was proof. His cowardice in the park, the way he had left those who had saved his life to fend for themselves, was full-on proof.
“Are you all right?” they repeated.
He pictured the four of them, in their modes of suffering.
“No,” he said. “Do I fucking look all right?”
24
WHAT WAS IMPORTANT WAS to get them cleaned up, get the blood off, avoid explanation. Joey carried way too much cocaine in her bag to want anyone to stop and inquire. So when she and Darlo blasted through the door of Patrick O’Byrne’s, a pub in the Irish style, she knew she just had to keep moving, not make eye contact, make it so the patrons could just mind their own faux-Celtic business. And so she and Darlo went through the doors in a fury and panic, and she didn’t stop for directions.
She held on to Darlo so he wouldn’t deviate from the course as they pitched into the men’s room, barreled into a stall smelling of antiseptic and lemons, banging their heads as two businessmen scurried out of there, drying their hands off with much deliberate speed and giving a wide berth to the girl in the suit and her friend in the leather jacket with blood strafed across his cheeks.
Joey knew that Darlo had been cut away from something, had experienced some sort of psychic cleaving, was down in the ancestral darkness, navigating issues that went to the core of him, issues that language could not assuage, and she felt that she had started it by making fun of his love declarations. She had lit the wick on some serious familial dynamite.
In the stall, he gazed upon her, daft and spaced out. That gaze melted her. Above his head, on the toilet paper dispenser, someone had scrawled, Amsterdam = overrated.
Yes, that gaze and its mixed meanings. But the analysis would have to wait for the hotel room. First she had to bring the crying son of the porn king back from the deep space of airless grief.
“Darlo!” she yelled, and slapped him across the face.
Darlo came back, sniffling. His leather pants made crunchy noises. She took his face in her hands. She felt the squareness of his jaw. What a jaw.
“We clean up and get out of here, yeah?”
The prince nodded. Wavelets of black hair fell over his face. He sniffled and wiped his nose on his jacket. Snot streaked his face, and Joey wiped it off.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He nodded. To make sure, Joey slapped him again, which turned her on.
“We cannot have any problems. We are in serious jeopardy. OK?” Was it rain on his face, or tears? Had it been raining? She slapped him once more; this was fun. “OK?”
He nodded and grabbed her arm. “Just quit hitting me.”
They washed off over ornate fixtures as Joey contemplated her next steps. Now, on top of breaking his spirit completely with the label droppage, she was going to have to navigate his affection for her, the subject broached without ironic qualifiers and out in the open. Not pleasant; she’d never been in a situation, so long in coming to painful fruition, that she couldn’t act upon. One kiss and her power over him, her Pure Spell of Physical Withholding, would be broken forever. She couldn’t risk it.
Darlo looked over. They locked eyes. He nodded and held up his hands, water running down his sleeves.
“Blood’s gone,” he said.
A man came in and drew back when he saw the beat-up tourists. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, thanks,” Joey said, and rejected the idea of yelling about skinheads attacking them and Amsterdam’s unreal hypocrisies. Pulling Darlo along, she pushed past the man, threw open the pub doors, and continued on to the hotel.
Darlo started babbling about his dad. That was fine. Better for him to babble about his dad than his feelings for her. She cursed herself; here was her best friend and theoretical lover finally opening up, finally vulnerable. But with Darlo preoccupied with the tax-evading slimeball, she could gather her head, put away the trauma of the past hour, and go back to thinking about dinner, trying to make a mad dash into some hidden corner of her consciousness where shitty reality could not track her. Now dread overcame her. The altercation with the skinheads took on an inexplicable glow in comparison. She had never grown so nostalgic so fast. She had never seen just what a crock of shit nostalgia really was, when you could sugarcoat something horrible in less than an hour’s time.
When she got back to her empty West Hollywood office, she’d send Arthur St. What-the-Fuck at Spin an e-mail and tell him about the big payback. They beat up some skinheads. They vanquished the racist element. How about running another review? Could you turn back time? Could you find some way?
The lights were up on the Leidesplein. They took the scenic route. Amsterdam would be a great place to come back to one day, she thought, when I am in love with someone who is not in my band, and maybe even someone who is not in the music business. Pretty lights. So pretty. What if pretty could be the word that ran her life, instead of poser?
But for now, back to seating arrangements. Who, when they got the bad news, would be least likely to physically attack her? Adam and Bobby; she ought to put them next to her. Let them get knifed. Let them get whiskey thrown in their faces. She would have Poncy-Pants and the Mummy as her front line to absorb the first wave of heat off Darlo and Shane’s breath. She thought of the scene in that movie about the Who, in which Keith Moon talked about weathering the rotten vegetables that people threw at him during shows. The cymbals were key to avoiding a mess on his face.
“I just turn them up,” Moon said, wearing a frilly white shirt and a black beard, “and at the end of the night I have a delicious salad. It’s quite nice, really.”
Adam and Bobby would be the cymbals, deflecting the rancid praise. She could hide behind them. She didn’t owe them shit. Maybe she would end up with a salad.
“Completely,” she said, agreeing to the logic of an unknown assertion that Darlo, in his babbletude, was making. “Absolutely.”
“Just so fucking stupid is all!” Darlo crescendoed, and grabbed the manager. “So stupid of the old sick fuck, right?”
“Totally. Seriously.”
“Are you listening?”
“To you?” She grabbed the leather sleeves and dust rose off them. “All ears, babe.”
With night coming on, the air grew cold and damp, but that didn’t deter the scarved-out Dutchies from their high-nosed happiness. They moved in a lilt, swinging kid-leather briefcases, riding old three-speeds like they were ready for the Tour de France.
Darlo shrugged at a phone booth. “Can I use that eight-pound phone again?”
She reached into her bag. “Here,” she said. �
��Use a credit card. It’s cheaper.”
“Thanks, babe,” he said, and ran off.
With Darlo out of earshot, Joey took out the phone and dialed Adam. She felt preemptive guilt, as in, We should have gone after him. We should have protected him. I’m a bad person and a bad manager. I’m a terrible fucking person. I’m a —
“Joey?” Adam said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Are you? Are you in shock? You sound too calm.”
“I’ve said like four words.”
She lit a smoke and realized that she was sober. “Four words?”
“What’s wrong, Joey?”
“You’re all right?”
“Yeah. Some people took me into a restaurant and got me washed up.”
“Roger that, we sort of found a restaurant too, it was OK, are you OK?”
“Yes.”
Joey watched Darlo in the green KPN booth, pointing his finger at someone thousands of miles away, spinning around. “Was just so terrible, what happened.”
“Yeah. I feel good, actually. I shouldn’t, but I feel exhilarated.”
I don’t, she thought. They’re going to kill me when I tell them that Warners said fuck off and die. They’ll never forgive or forget.
John Hackney’s handsome face reared up. “What could we do?” he said, in that dream-echo used for cheesy television murder mysteries, when the detective recalls a key moment. “There’s nothing we could do. Noth-ing. Nu-huh-huh-thing-ing-ing.”
That echo had some monumental acoustics. Ripples in the screen. It would be better to quit this phone conversation before she blurted out the truth.
“Just wanted to make sure you’re all right,” she said. “You’re all exhilarated because you’re in shock. Enjoy it, because after you come down, you might get more than a little freaked out.”
“I know. I’m going to Morten’s to take a nap.”
“Roger that.”
“Sounds like you need a nap too.”
“I do,” she said. “A dirt nap. Hey, had these people who helped you out heard of us?”
“No. But they’re going to come to the show tonight.”
“Paying customers,” Joey said, as Darlo spun faster in the booth, gaining velocity, gaining torque. “How novel.”
25
STANDING OUTSIDE THE IRISH BAR while Joey sniffed out their direction, Darlo realized what had happened. When he was on that skinhead, mashing his face into the earth, he’d come in his pants.
Yes, he had. Couldn’t believe it. Pounding that guy, softening him up for the kill, and then a warm sensation in his crotch. Warm tears of rage on his face, warm sex tears down below.
But it felt as natural as wind off the back of his hand. It felt like something a person goes through now and then, perennial and unchanging. Getting on top of a person, beating him to the brink of death, and coming in your pants. What could be more natural?
A genetic code was a funky thing. That double helix had shady sides, a half that curved inward, away from light. You could see it in any diagram. That explained something.
The wetness on his face and in his crotch — now that was some kind of scary symmetry. And it had happened before. This one time after a show at Spaceland, he brought two girls home, got on top of one, and started strangling her. She had said that she liked getting strangled. It made her come harder. “Yeah, baby,” she promised. “Makes me shudder like a fucking earthquake.”
He strangled her, and she began to make hard guttering croaks. And then the warmth and wetness above and below. Both above and below, as the other girl threw herself on him because her friend was turning blue. She scratched at him, and the other girl coughed and screamed. He backed into a corner, lashing out at nothing, swinging at the air, grabbing at his own neck in shame.
After that, he went a whole week without sex. He lost five pounds. Every time he put food in his mouth, he retched.
He should have known this would happen again. But he wouldn’t have imagined it would be on top of some dude, in a park, while saving your guitar player’s ass. Violence on top of violence was a compound force that turned him on while gazing further into that shady side of the double helix, where the truth lay in fetid genetic ponds.
On top of that, he’d let himself go and told Joey what he thought of her, shared his feelings for once, unguarded, and she had called him faggy. She knew damn well how much it meant, and she had mocked him. Just beyond belief.
Darlo had, on the lit side of that wending series of nucleotides, a desire for the forward thrust, all engines go and don’t look back. But now the engine unraveled; he felt the unspooling, a sensation through him of the mechanism going loose. Since the moment that first ATM card had failed, all the latent, beaten-down worries — the band, his dad, his mom, his entire nature — had stormed his steel-skinned castle of righteous good times. Now, when he looked back weeks, months, years, this unraveling became visible.
So much to try to figure out. How was this trouble with his dad going to shake out with Warners? They wouldn’t love the fact that the drummer’s father was a sex slaver tax evader — not a bad name for the next record — but he imagined all kinds of positive spin emerging out of the swirl. Blood Orphans were bad boys, so what difference did it make? That would only add to their mystique, would be a selling point for the next record. When the first Aerosmith record had come out, it wouldn’t have mattered if Steven Tyler’s dad had been a porn-collar felon. Nothing stopped Tyler and nothing would stop Darlo.
No, dude, he thought. You’re so off.
“This way,” Joey said, and they bolted down the Leidesplein.
He and Joey walked at a fast clip toward the hotel. Streetlamps lit up the canals in a diffuse glow, but he longed for the winding sweat and heat of Sunset Boulevard, the cool salty breeze down on Venice Pier, the panoramic view from the Griffith Observatory. Just walking the LA streets, hour after hour, would help make things right.
So much to figure out, and no help from the manager. What was she hiding from him, behind her beautiful sloe eyes, besides her love? Worst-case scenario: Adam was leaving the band. Best-case scenario: Bobby was leaving the band. Now, at the end of the touring cycle, would be the ideal time to let him go. Who needed a Root-Note Ronnie with hands of mud to hold the music back? So why wouldn’t Joey just tell him about it? Bobby leaving the band was great news.
Two skinheads, taller than the other ones, walked past them, and he floated in his shoes a little. They were probably friends with the kid he’d pulverized, with the kid upon whom he’d released more than just his rage. Self-disgust coated his thoughts.
Joey took his arm. “Are you cold?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re shaking like an old fucking engine.”
He wanted to grab her, hold her, try a little tenderness. But no way would she reject him again. No way would she make him feel like a chump for emerging from the darkness of the double helix to throw light.
Another green phone booth beckoned, and he secured Joey’s credit card, a nice break from the ridiculaphone. He dialed Jesse; the ship was not going to sink with all his coke, speed, and unlicensed guns aboard. He would not be greeted at Long Beach by an ATF agent holding a mug shot of his dad and a warrant for his arrest.
In a fiber-optic sleeze-itude, he shot over the North Pole, ripped through clouds above Ellesmere Island, pounded down pine forests outside Calgary, bounced off radio towers in Nevada, repelled static in Sacramento, and landed in Jesse’s soft, small-time drug-dealing palm.
“Dude,” the dealer said. “I’m in my Benz. Bad news and good news. Which do you —”
“What are you eating?”
“A burger from In-N-Out. Got the Double-Double and a chocolate shake. Breakfast of champions, bitch!”
“I’d kill for one of those. So what’s the good news?”
“There’s no cops at the house.” He sucked down ice cream. “The windows in the back were open and I just hopped right in. Didn’t th
e old man make bail?”
Dad was hiding, Darlo knew, down in the dungeon, and probably not alone.
“Bad news,” Jesse said, “is that I didn’t find a thing.”
“Did you look where I told you to look?”
“No, I looked where you didn’t tell me to look. What the fuck do you think?”
Darlo formed a vision of his room, saw the red walls, the G-Swing hanging in the corner, and the four-poster bed that Dad had assured him had belonged to Jayne Mansfield. He saw the scratches on the poles where hundreds of girls had run their nails, stretching their hands out, reaching, grabbing, coming.
“Darlo?”
“Hold on, I’m fucking thinking.”
He saw the closet, hanging clothes, big-buckle belts of Harley-Davidson, Wall Drug, Queen, Aerosmith, the state of Texas, shirts of silk and satin. On the shelf above his clothes lay the velvet shotgun box, wherein lay the doobage, the powders, the apparatus, and the several illegal firearms.
“You got up there and really looked? It could have got pushed back. You’re short — did you get a chair and look all the way in the back?”
“Nothing was there, bro.”
“Are you sure?” Darlo asked. “Are you sure you’re not lying to me?”
“Are you crazy? Why would I lie to you?”
“You’re a fucking drug dealer, that’s why.”
“And you’re a fucking drug user. So that makes us even.”
He looked down at his hands. Joey was right. Shaking real hard.
“Don’t fucking lie to me, Jesse. I’ll fucking kill you.”
Jesse laughed as if someone had slipped on a banana peel, light and surprised and joyous. “Dude,” he said. “Come on, now. Jesus in fucking heaven, man.”
Joey tapped on the booth, then tapped her watch. Darlo turned away.
“Maybe you put it somewhere else in the house,” Jesse said. “What about the pool cabana? Isn’t that where you keep it sometimes?”
Darlo cringed. Bad memories tracked him. On his last trip home, the pool cabana was where he had found his father fucking some coed from UCLA whom Darlo had brought home a few times. The man’s face loomed up out of his mind’s murk, popping around every corner, a paternal Whac-a-Mole. Was there a location he could think of in which his father did not hide?
Rock Bottom Page 20
