Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  Your love’s so good that it’s a fucking crime.

  Drag your way over to my house any time.

  Shane took a look at their openmouthed expressions, curling into dull smiles, turning into a recognition of his ability to turn this lyrical shit into sugar. That’s right, he thought, I can be a transformative agent for good. I’m hitting all the right notes. I’m totally rocking this room. Without Darlo or Bobby or Adam. I don’t need them at all. Look at the wide eyes and the bouncing in the seats. They get me. They understand how I transcend the stupid lyrics, set them alight with a higher truth. He thought of Bible camp up in the Sierra Nevadas, when they would gather around the campfire and sing songs — “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and “She Loves You” and “Cathy’s Clown.” Those were fantastic times; play on, play on, there’s nothing here but the Good Lord and us.

  He yelled out in merry song. He threw his dreads around. He channeled the rock-and-roll furies. No Bobby or Darlo or Adam.

  Hella-Prosthetica, take me down.

  When I’m with you, I’m just your lovin’ clown.

  I thank the gods for bringing you to me.

  I’ll carry you anyplace you need to be!

  He paused and looked around the room with utter supreme mastery. Just like at Bible camp.

  Hella-hella-hella! … Hella-hella-hella! … Prosthetica!

  Prosthetica!

  Utter supreme transcendence. He slammed down the last lines.

  Hella-hella-hella! … Hella-hella-hella! … Prosthetica!

  Prosthetica!

  A steam tower of peanut butter power wafted up from his body. He rose with it to greet the triumphant silence. The hotel room sparkled, shimmering, humid. He held himself up for the adoration of this transcendent moment.

  One by one, like a row of synchronized swimmers diving into a pool, they fell over laughing. Like warped dominoes, they banged against each other and buckled, the eight of them, until Shane was the only one still sitting, bent against the winds of derision.

  Dave surfaced and propped himself up.

  “Oh my God, that was so bad!” He coughed and turned red. “Oh my God, that was so bad, but you … oh man … oh, that was beautiful!”

  Shane thought back to Bible campfires. Girls adored him — wholesome girls, not the ones Darlo had brought to him, rotting his virtue.

  “Oh, but what can a poor boy do?” Ron sang, “ ’cept to sing for a rock-and-roll band?”

  Wholesome girls.

  “Stop him,” one of the girls said, laughing. “Stop him before he kills again!”

  Such a pathetic attempt he had made, trying so hard to impress these strangers in their newly minted bubble of limitless and fully recoupable expense account. So lame to have come all this way to curry some favor, to try and jump someone else’s train right as his went completely off the rails. But he was no train-jumper, no acrobat, no stuntman. He was tied to the front of the Blood Orphans crazy train, the mascot, the very face of it, as if flew off the tracks and headed for reality’s hard rock mountainside. He could do nothing but close his eyes and prepare for the impact.

  4

  ADAM EXAMINED THE TOURING VAN that sat outside Morten’s, a shiny black Sprinter without a trailer. Band stickers covered the bumper, a little too obviously crooked, as if some A&R intern had put them on that way, going for maximum cred. Adam groaned; Morten had double-booked and now he’d be stuck navigating the choppy waters of rock musician autism.

  He climbed the stairs, waiting to hear the hollow tones of dudes cracking open beers, claiming beds, strumming guitars, lighting up the bong.

  “Hello?” he yelled up the creaky staircase. “Hello?”

  In the kitchen, a male body stood in shadow. For a second he thought this shadow was Bobby, but then he saw that the guy had his hands in his pockets, something the bass player’s condition would not allow. The guy wore a black suit, had gel in his wavy black hair, and was trying to navigate that nasty-ass coffeemaker.

  “It doesn’t work,” Adam said, and introduced himself.

  “John Bridges,” said the man, in a reformed Cockney. “You in Blood Orphans?”

  “Yeah. Have you heard of us?”

  “Just a little.” He poured some ground coffee. “I’m the manager for Deena Freeze.”

  “That’s me,” said a voice behind him. On a bed that had previously been defiled by Darlo, a young woman tuned a Martin acoustic. She looked as if she’d just walked out of a Vogue photo shoot of fairies dancing and flying in the verdant British countryside, black hair tied up in small braids at the front but hasty at the back. Makeup glittered around her eyes. She wore a long, tight patchwork skirt and a black peasant blouse. Around her slim neck a string of shiny golden stones.

  “We were warned about you,” she said, in a throaty king’s English.

  “By who?”

  “Marta at Full Bore.”

  “We have the same publicist?”

  “And the same label,” she said, strumming. “My record’s out in a month on Warners. I’m opening for you tonight.”

  Adam watched Bridges lean against the wall in a way that Joey never could, as if the wall had a crush on him and had been waiting the whole damn school year for him to make his move. Behind him, glued to the window, lay the dried, smashed carcass of a wasp.

  “Excuse me,” Adam said, because he suddenly wanted to make sure he didn’t still have blood on his face. “Be right back.”

  In the bathroom, he washed up and looked in the mirror. His faraway eyes brought to mind those pictures from Life magazine’s book of photographs that he had had as a kid, of war veterans. He stared at his beat-up face and thought of the picture of a GI from the Korean War, wrapped in blankets out in the rain, head shrouded in wet flannel, looking to the sky, hopeless.

  When he’d crashed his bike into the brick wall, the crowd of Dutchies had paid him a surprising amount of attention, and a pair of swish designers had taken him into some café, expressed their sympathies for his condition, the cause of which the guitar player would not divulge. They bought him toast, jam, and espresso. “I’m a vegetarian,” he said, turning down the ham.

  Adam examined his blackening eye, and the crud on Morten’s mirror, and the shower curtain with all those superheroes looking cocksure but flying toward the floor at ridiculous angles, useless vectors.

  When he emerged, Deena and her slick, brassy manager were staring beatifically into space.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Not feeling so great.”

  “No worries,” she said. “Is your face all right?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “Cor,” she said, and batted her eyes. “You know, I wasn’t expecting such a polite young man. Marta said you were some rough crack.”

  “I’m the exception,” Adam said. “The rest of them have a real appetite for self-destruction.”

  “Tough tough boys,” Bridges said, smoking. “That’s what Marta said. A regular wrecking crew. Kept talking about some lad whose hands are terribly fucked up. Bandages covering them?”

  “Bobby,” Adam said. “He has terrible eczema. We call him the Mummy.”

  “Ugh!” Deena laughed. “A perfect segue for tea!”

  Deena told him she’d been on Warners for close to a year. The label’s strategy was to release an acoustic disc and send her off with Bridges for three months of low-overhead, getting-to-know-you touring, playing in small clubs and cashing in on her ragamuffin looks and angel eyes. Then she’d make a record with a band and they’d give her the full push.

  “I was a model,” she said, “but music is everything to me. Let me play you something?”

  Adam nodded. Guileless as he was, he had been doing this long enough to recognize her harmless calculation.

  When she started singing, Adam saw the angle, half Sarah McLachlan and half P. J. Harvey, sweet but edgy, a little bit will-o’-the-wisp, but mostly Ophelia starting to burn up, burn up beautifully
.

  “Kiss me down your lips,” she sang in midtempo. “Fuel me with your fire. Harbor your tall ship. Moor me on desire.”

  Jagged chords. An angry firefly.

  “Burn down the reef,” she chorused. “I am with you still. Scorch the port, damn the launch, I am the oil spilled.”

  Bridges, her number-one fan, watched with adoration, continuing to lean sensuously against the wall in his black suit, smoke curling up from his meaty, long-fingered hands adorned with thick rings, Liberace meets the Krays. Deena bore down on the guitar, cradled the Martin as if it were her mortally wounded child.

  Adam had seen plenty of girls like this in Los Angeles, at open mike nights and Tuesday evening chump slots, opening for other bands without a draw, but who was he to judge? She was the one with the fresh Warners contract, at the very start, setting sail, the Royal Deena Britannia. And so he clapped and smiled, glad to be a guest on this sparkling new vessel.

  “Nice work, love,” Bridges said.

  “Cheers,” she said, and handed the guitar to Adam. “Now you play something.”

  A good guitar had a certain amazing weight distribution; the Martin practically floated in his hands. He bowed his head and played a section from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. He wouldn’t have played such an intricate, showy number, but he wanted to impress them, so he played with more than a little mastery. He played as if Segovia had reached across the spectral divide and taken hold of his rock-and-roll fingers. He could do that.

  Steam blew through the radiators with the clang of pipes. Valves opened and closed, putting a rhythm to his playing.

  This piece was one of his favorites. Growing up, Adam would play it over and over again on the cheap Ovation he’d bought at Bakersfield Pawn, while his brothers stood outside, revving engines. “Hey, Hendrix!” they’d yell. “Why don’t you come down here and show us your latest tricks? Play your guitar behind your back and shit.” They laughed from the lawn, revving the new V-8 they’d put in an old Corvair. They were illustrated men, bear-arm muscles rippling under the ink, sinews storming up through portraits of samurai warriors and iron crosses. “Show us your moves, pretty boy!”

  He threw in jazzy notes and power-chord riffage on a theme. He juggled phrases in the air like swords on fire, catching them without a care. He turned Bach’s melodies into an expression of endless life. When he finished, sweat ran down his face, stung his cuts. The two strangers clapped and exhaled.

  “Brilliant,” Deena said. “Fantastic!”

  Bridges had upped himself off the wall. “Fuckin’ A,” the manager said. “Bloody amazing.”

  Adam looked out the window at Amsterdam descending into night. But his sight flickered for a moment, and he watched his brothers stare at him from atop their Corvair, framed in the fading California sun. Light ran down their faces in a tearlike translucence.

  “Hey, man,” Bridges said. “How come you never do that in Blood Orphans?”

  Adam wiped down the guitar with the sheet. “Darlo would never allow it.”

  “He’s the manager?” Bridges asked.

  “The drummer. The dictator.”

  Bridges scrunched up his face. “That’s a lot of shit, man,” he replied without raising his voice. “Any band you’re in that you can’t do that, you shouldn’t be in.”

  Deena took the guitar from Adam and held it as if Adam had brought her child back from the dead.

  “I just can’t believe,” Bridges said, “that a brilliant guitar player like you is stuck playing that stock trash.”

  Adam agreed, even though he’d written said stock trash. “Sometimes I can’t believe it either.”

  “Sometimes? No, man, you must be walking around in a grand state of bloody world-class denial. You can play like fucking Clapton and you’re in Blood Orphans? From your band’s bad rep, I would have thought the last thing I’d find would be a bloke who could play a fucking Bach fugue as if he wrote it yesterday during sound check.” He looked at Deena. “We should take Adam to dinner.”

  “Cor,” she said.

  “I can’t,” Adam said. “I have to go to dinner with the band. Our manager’s in town.”

  “Who’s your manager?” Bridges said, lighting a Players.

  “Joey Fredericks. DreamDare Management. Bottle blonde with a gimp leg. Heard of her?”

  Bridges waved his cigarette and tightened his smiling face. “No,” he said, his voice louder, on pitch. “But you tell her that John Bridges heard you play today. You tell her that John Bridges from Avatar Management, who has fifteen artists on five major labels and a most excellent licensing portfolio, who makes stars out of mere glistening grains of sand — you tell her that she should be ashamed of herself for not letting you do what you do because the drummer’s got a small cock.”

  “Here he goes,” Deena said, smiling.

  Bridges blew smoke in the air and laughed. They lived in a world of calm and light.

  “Yeah, you tell her that,” Bridges said, shaking his head. “And tell her I’ll see her tonight to shake her skirt. Jesus fucking Christ. Bloody joke-metal prison. Rattle your bars, Adam. Rattle your bars!”

  5

  WHEN JOEY OFFERED UP some pay-to-cum, Darlo almost declined. He almost grabbed her by that dirty platinum scruff, the short wire-hairs at the back of her slight neck, and made his move. He knew damn well that whatever was between them had grown, just as he had. But he didn’t grab her. He didn’t say no to her wad of euros. Because she understood him. She knew him inside out and had considered the obvious nature of his heart and crotch. Appreciation was as rare an emotion for Darlo as doubt, but through his body the two feelings crashed and coursed. Back in LA, he would make things right with her. They would even go on a real date, with flowers and candy; he’d go down on her before dinner, whatever she wanted. But for now she knew that he needed her surrogate.

  After he got the lead out, he would get back to logistics and plans, call Jesse and get an update, call McFadden and give him some hard truth about his dad, and then he really ought to call the cops. Right? He wavered on the notion of being such a full-on Judas.

  “I’m not him,” he said. “Fuck him.”

  But now he would show that little black-haired Winona-frau. He would present her with the Cox magic, the mad Darlo science, ride her hard and leave her wet and begging for more. He had the euros and could get whatever he wanted. Northern Euro girls, with their tight glottal moans, like they were choking on the smallest little bit of pride. He’d make her his little black-haired autobahn and take her curves real tight.

  Without warning or provocation, he thought of Shane standing on some nameless stage, stuck in a ridiculous pose of rock god, trying to be Robert Plant and Perry Farrell, skinny chest out and stupid short white dreads sprouting from his head like eyes on a potato.

  Why did his mind have to fucking go and ruin the moment?

  There she was. In the pink window. He marched over.

  “See you later,” he told Joey, who was standing in the street uncapping that flask of awful apple ripple she loved. “Thanks, babe.”

  The girl in the window recognized him immediately and began shaking her head. He flashed his money and yelled out his contrition for all to see. The remnants of the loogie that he’d spit earlier were still congealed on the glass. She waved her finger, like, Not a chance. He waved the bills in the air furiously.

  “Look, please, come on, how can you say no to this. Look!”

  She spent a few moments thinking it over, then spoke through the glass. “Hold on, please,” she said, and disappeared through her black curtain.

  Oh fuck, was he going to give it to her. The longer she held him back, the harder she was going to make it for herself. Shane’s pasty chest continued to block pleasing images from his mind’s eye. That fucking poser pussy. When he saw the singer later, he would lay down ultimata. Get rid of those ridiculous dreads or you’re fired. Not another mention of Buddhist Tantric Zen chickenshit or you can find another band
on a major fucking label.

  He turned and looked back for Joey, but she was gone.

  “Huh,” he said as the girl opened the door. He bore his gaze into hers and put the cash in her hand. “I wasn’t kidding. There it is. So I can do whatever I want with you now.”

  “American boy,” she said, looking at the money, “you’ll do what I tell you that you can do. Understand?”

  Some spit almost fell from his mouth as he took in her milky breasts, soft, rolling hills in the northern dells of green-fielded, thatched-roof Holland.

  “Because that’s how it’s done here,” she said. “Or we don’t play. You act nice. No second chances.”

  “You got it, baby,” he said, closing the door. “Fucking sweet.”

  She walked behind the curtain. The room smelled of cedar. Darlo’s stomach grumbled. A strobe light came on and he felt alone, back in the canyon, stepping on sharp sticks, crying out for that girl.

  “All right,” he said. “Don’t keep me waiting, baby.”

  She came out with a can of Coke. She smiled and cracked it open. “I love this stuff,” she said, took a gulp, set it down next to the bed. “Now take off your clothes, boy.”

  “It’s Darlo.”

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “A stud’s name.”

  She laughed, but not with him, and said something in Dutch. Darlo’s feet felt numb. “Take your clothes off, Darlo.”

  “You first. I’m paying.”

  She smiled and swept off her top, revealing small, rounded breasts and a thin silver chain hanging from her belly button. She sat on the bed, spread her legs, and rubbed herself.

  “Your turn,” she said, speaking in monotone. “Show me that big American muscle.”

  He took off his jacket and his T-shirt, showing the skinny, broad-shouldered, bare-chested figure that had always served him so well. A little bit of belly sat there, like a badly thought-out addition to a mansion. Then he dropped his pants. A minute before, his cock had raged against the inside of his leathers, harder than water from a copper mine. Now he was soft as a piece of Play-Doh.

  “What the fuck?” he said, pink walls closing in. “Wait a second.”