Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  She rubbed at her pussy some more. Darlo tried to concentrate.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Stressed out about something?”

  “No, I just …” He stared at his cock like they’d never met. “Just wait a minute.”

  The strobe light powered over them. Some saxophone-ridden smoky jazz came out of the stereo.

  She moved to the floor and crawled toward him, coming alive a little. “I can help, boy,” she said, and stuck out her tongue. “I can bring you my soft, sweet little mouth.” She stopped every few moments to bring her hand against her crotch, reaching in, bowing her head down. “So soft and wet. Wet,” she whispered, and her voice blended into the music. When the strobe hit her face, sweat appeared on her alabaster cheeks.

  “Wet, boy. Stroke your cock, baby.”

  He touched it and felt nothing. Her belly-button chain dangled.

  “My mouth is soft and wet,” she said. “Stroke.”

  She was almost below him, but Darlo wasn’t getting any harder. He was still thinking about that girl hiding in the canyon woods, blood running down her legs, the bramble cutting her up as she crouched, hid from the Cox Leatherman. Hid from Darlo’s cries of help.

  She looked at me, Darlo thought, and saw him. She saw me through the brush and thought, It’s a trick. They’ll kill me.

  “Baby, come on,” Ms. Pink said. “I’m getting closer, baby. Stroke that cock, big boy.”

  The police would ransack the house, but they wouldn’t know the combination on the door to the dungeon. His dad wouldn’t tell them the combination and McFadden wouldn’t make him, so they wouldn’t find them in time. When they broke through, they would find bones and flesh. He would be the inheritor of all this death and suffering. Uncovering the Cox family plot, they would find rot and worms. He would be connected to this forever. How could he save them?

  “Here is my mouth, baby,” she said, and her breath was on his crotch. She looked up at him with complete commitment. “Give me that cock.”

  Staring down her throat was like staring down the stairs of his father’s snuff cave. Into the dark. Flickers of tonsils. Mouths without bodies. Mouths ripped apart. He was connected to this. He had installed the door. He had screwed in the bolt.

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  Deep in the dark of her mouth, girls tied up, hidden. Deep in the dark of her mouth, rotting bodies, sorrow and hurt. And him.

  “Give it to me,” she said, the strobe over her mouth as if she were a pole dancer at the Peppermint Castle. “All the way down, baby. All the way down there.”

  “No,” he said, and moved away. “No, shit, no.”

  Somewhere down there. All of them. Bodies in pieces. Connected to him forever. He was soft. Her face was wet.

  “What’s wrong?” she said. “Are you all right?”

  He fell to the floor. He crumpled up.

  6

  AN HOUR AFTER MEETING Deena Freeze, Adam sat in the office of Fritz Mallgroom, from whom Blood Orphans rented all their equipment. He’d come from Morten’s with two guitars, a Les Paul and a Telecaster, that belonged to Fritz, in the hope that he could quickly drop them off and head to the bar of the Krasnapolsky. Adam thought it would be nice to have a drink on Joey’s tab before dinner. Fuck Joey, right? Everybody else says fuck Joey, so to speak, so why can’t I?

  But nothing happened fast with stony Fritz, who was taking care of a band of skinny-tied emo fops named Praise Chorus. They were arguing with each other over the size of their amps, and Fritz refused to weigh in.

  “Internal affairs,” he said. “Utterly, man.”

  His office, at the end of the equipment catacombs, was overrun with instruments. Here, collecting dust and half covered with papers and exotic stringed instruments, were Hammond B-3s, Wurlitzers, a mellotron. On top of an Ashdown amp, two lutes balanced with a bag of apples. Fritz ate apples constantly so he wouldn’t smoke. Through the doorway, Praise Chorus argued on and on while Fritz, in his leonine shag, Golden Delicious in hand, sat serenely on a Marshall cab.

  “That Marshall Fritz is sitting on is too big, dude!”

  “Well, it’s the only thing that can counter your Vox!”

  “We just can’t fit it in the van unless James gets a smaller set of drums.”

  “Fuck that, dude. Why am I always the one who has to sacrifice?”

  The first time Blood Orphans rented from Fritz, they spent all afternoon pulling this prima donna shit. Fritz’s slow, contemplative ways had driven Darlo insane; every time the drummer raised his voice, Fritz shushed him. “Quiet,” he said, as if a giant slept next door. “Must keep it quiet, man.”

  “But why can’t I have that old Gretsch?” Darlo said, pointing at a burnished gold set on the shelf that looked good as new. “You have to give me a reason.”

  “Too much noise,” Fritz said, and bit into the crunchiest apple ever. “So loud somewhere. Can you hear it?”

  The others loved watching Fritz gibberish Darlo into submission.

  Fritz was a Christian man, which endeared Shane to him. Upon his desk lay a rosary wrapped around an old silver clock. Next to that was a portrait of his two hot blond daughters dressed as Santa’s elves on a ski slope, their feet bound up in Rossignols. Next to that was a signed portrait of Jimmy Page.

  Adam went into the bathroom, hidden behind keyboard cases. He washed his face and looked in the mirror. A large scratch, as if from a dog, bisected his left cheek. His right eye had puffed and was almost black. Caked blood nested under a few fingernails.

  He remembered the feel of hard ground and the huge weight on his arms when the Nazi pinned him. The boy had had nostrils that flared up like a bull’s. Adam wondered what had happened earlier to his attackers during the day, but figured that humanizing the assaulters would only lead down his default road of feeling bad for those who had fucked him.

  When he emerged from the bathroom, Praise Chorus were loading their stuff into the freight elevator and Fritz was sitting cross-legged on a Marshall cabinet in his vest — brocade and silk, Fritz’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat — eating another apple, silver cross hovering above his New Age Christian bling.

  One of the kids came back and practically begged Fritz for the lime-green Danelectro hanging with the other very fine guitars, between a gold-top Les Paul and a brown Gretsch Country Gentleman.

  “Next time,” Fritz said. “Next time when you’ve brought everything else back. Can’t just lend out any old thing, no?”

  The kid looked about fifteen, but he had a fire in his eyes. “I’ll have our manager wire collateral,” the boy said. “Please.”

  Fritz crossed his legs tighter and chomped the apple. “You must earn trust from a man, you know. Trust is like a glue that creates calm between men. That is the only way.”

  The kid nodded, confused, and retreated into the elevator. The back of his leather jacket had a cross on it, with the words Solidarity and Faith in florid lettering rainbowed over the top.

  Fritz uncurled from the amp. The guy could shrink and expand at will, like a real superhero. His kingly mane was suspended above his head like a crown.

  “Ah, Adam,” he said. “Finally the little kiddies are gone.”

  “I’m not much older than them,” the guitar player said.

  “Ah, but you are.” He lit a clove cigarette, sickly sweet. The smell of a million Goth dreams floated up to the vaulted ceiling. “They are just on their first time out, I think. You have braved the wilds. You are a logger of miles in the van. Age is immaterial, man, not a measurement of anything.” He plunked down in his leather chair and touched the picture of his daughters skiing as if lighting a devotional candle. “So, what of Blood Orphans? How is Shane?”

  “Tired. We’re all tired. Shane is into Buddhism now. I don’t know. We don’t really get along.”

  “Shane is a seeker.”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “I am quoting him,” Fritz said, and smiled. “He cornered me by the bass
amplifiers and asked me about my journey. He is a seeker, though, that is true. I am not sure what he will find. He is a ragtag boy of many colors.”

  Adam had no idea what that meant, but it sounded nice. The man’s voice was a lullaby.

  “And what of Darlo, sad Darlo? When will he come back with half of what he borrowed?” He crunched his apple. “When do you think his reckoning will come?”

  “Probably never. Nothing bad could happen to him.”

  “Don’t believe it,” Fritz said. “Not … a word. For so much bad has already happened. Listen. He is telling you.”

  Fritz motioned to a stack of CDs on his desk, and there, in between Pavement and Evanescence, lay Rocket Heart. Adam put it in the boom box.

  “Darlo is not the boy-king that you perceive,” he said. “He is the one confounded in pain. Wrapped up in a stasis of suffering.”

  Rocket Heart’s lead-off track, “Beretta-Couda,” began, with a stomping rhythm not unlike half of the AC/DC catalogue. It was the second song Darlo and Adam had written in the basement rec room of the Cox mansion, sitting on the pool table and drinking Buds. The thousand-dollar-a-day sound of Paradise exploded through the tinny old Sony speakers.

  She’s got a love-stunner gun-tail move like a shark.

  I love her and I hate her but she keeps me in the dark.

  I swim along her reef to try to find the hidden treasure,

  But my bones break on her rocks. When will I get her

  secret pleasure?

  Insert roaring guitar solo to punctuate said waterbound frustration. Insert Adam, finding his way through Darlo’s inability to put his sexual frustration to words, trying to perform a solo that approximated the metaphor of woman-as-ocean, vast tidebound taunting.

  “Darlo loves that song,” Adam said over the din. “He says it’s the closest he’s ever come to putting his sex addiction down on paper.”

  Fritz crunched his apple and bobbed his head along, shaking blond hair loose, and unveiled a red bong from behind some keyboards. At the base, in some kind of tropical font, were the words Happy Notions.

  “The funny thing is,” Adam said, “he can’t swim.”

  “That is funny,” Fritz said. “The ironies of this turning world. God and all of his follies. All of the many ways, man, the countless ways He shows that we are silly and after a fashion of the times. Our laments. The messes that show His glory in contrast.”

  “Beretta-Couda” finished and “Double Mocha Lattay” began.

  Fritz climbed up on a Marshall four-by-twelve and crossed his legs. “All of these songs, man,” he said. “Darlo and his unconquerable women, Darlo and his elusive feminines, the anger, the torment.” He chewed the apple. “Such sadness in the boy. Can you hear it?”

  Adam imagined Darlo as a little kid, sitting in some palatial room while the whole house moaned orgasmically around him. But he couldn’t imagine Darlo as a little kid. Instead he saw the adult Darlo, in giant OshKosh overalls, sucking his thumb, rocking back and forth.

  “Now it is all over,” Fritz said. “Blood Orphans goes kaput. What will happen when little Darlo has to open that door and march downstairs?”

  Fritz turned off the boom box and tapped at the cross on his neck. Behind him, Amsterdam’s lights twinkled. “What about Shane? He’s a Buddhist now, you say?”

  “Ever since some girl he had sex with gave him a copy of Siddhartha.”

  “The seeker,” he said. “He told me he was a seeker. And good for you, I told him. But work on your attitude.” His voice got a little rough. “Arrogance is the fastest way to slow down the quest.”

  Adam found Fritz’s interest in Shane’s well-being to be unjustified and aggravating. Truth be told, he had always thought that Shane was the band lightweight. Bobby couldn’t really play, but Shane wasn’t really very smart. If Darlo hadn’t come along, he’d still be playing in The Dragon Slayed, trying to turn psalms into lyrics. And those lectures he gave from the stage were just disgusting. Often Adam would get some serious feedback going, in the hope of drowning the lectures out. Darlo cheered him on; it was the only time he felt like he and the drummer were communicating at all.

  “Let’s give the seeker a call,” Fritz said. “I want to talk to him.”

  7

  SHANE STUMBLED BACK toward Joey’s room. Had he ever felt so low? Certainly when his father expressed displeasure at Blood Orphans, Shane had felt as if he had deeply betrayed his morality … No he hadn’t. He hadn’t cared what his father had thought, that pious engineer with his fireside family bullshit. Who needed a fireplace in Orange County? The man lived inside a Royal Doulton miniature world, where everything was tidy and bodies were really made of gingerbread and bathrooms didn’t have toilets and crotches were smooth. A fucking fireplace in Orange County, where it never got cold enough to put on a cotton sweater.

  The muscles in his calves quivered a little. Two maids walked by, providing faint dirty looks. He could not bear to be a beggar just now, and kept his head down until they walked away. His phone rang.

  Fritz?

  “I am calling to check on my Christian brother,” said the renter of musical goods. “Adam says you are struggling with questions of theology.”

  “Yes,” he said, dumbstruck by the timing, wondering if it was more than mere accident, if perhaps this was a prelude to a vision. Accidents had to be visions now. Accidents were all he had.

  “Adam is sitting here,” Fritz said, “telling me of the end of days.”

  “It’s true. We’re fucked.”

  “Have faith,” Fritz said, and crunched an apple in Shane’s ear. “In every end is a beginning. Like when I stopped drinking, man. Like when I stopped whoring.”

  “I have been whoring,” Shane said. “I have been cruel. What can I do, Fritz?”

  “Be kind.”

  The face of Fritz appeared to him from the ceiling. Fritz with his mole on his chin, his gaggle of crow’s-feet, his slowly browning teeth. Fritz peering down at him as he squatted against the wall, shielding his eyes a little from the man’s spectral light. The overseer of the rock-and-roll junkyard, outfitter of almost-rans and pretend-to-bes. Adam hovered somewhere in that awesome haze, somewhere beneath, between, behind Fritz’s magic countenance, and Shane had to give the guitar player credit for that.

  “I tried everything,” the singer said. “I tried all the routes and nothing worked. We’re no good. Our songs suck. We suck. I suck.”

  “Hey, man, listen,” Fritz said. “You have to keep your eyes on the road, you know. It is the journey, not the destination.”

  “No, Fritz, I have to tell you, actually it is the destination.”

  Fritz laughed up in the ceiling. His holy maw dissolved Shane’s resistance. Celestial smoke billowed from his ears. “The engineer’s son,” he said. “The stubborn boy.”

  “I have no right to complain,” Shane said. “But I’ve fallen from God’s grace faster than Lucifer himself. You know what I mean? Hello?”

  His sweaty fingers had slipped and hung up on Fritz. He looked at the ceiling; no holy vision up there. Frantically he punched in Fritz’s number, but it wasn’t Fritz on the other end.

  “Shane?” Adam said. “Fritz will be right back. He went to talk to this other band that just showed up. Are you OK?”

  Now would be a perfect time to be thankful, to turn a corner on Adam and his precious, touchy-feely bullshit. But that voice was so fucking soft.

  Wandering in the forest, did the Buddha, in his most sacred moments, ever experience this disjunction? Was there a scene like that in the book? He really should have read the last thirty pages. But a seeker didn’t need to depend on words. A seeker was able to distill the —

  “Shane?” Adam said.

  “I have another call,” Shane said, and switched over to the blinking Dutch digits. “Danika, what do you want?”

  “Blondie boy,” she said. “I am walking in the street and thinking of you.”

  The smell of her voodoo butte
r rolled up his nose.

  “Thought about you all day in school,” she purred. “Thought about you so much I had to take a special little break with my pocket rocket.”

  “Look, I’m a little busy right now, Danika.”

  “So moody.” She giggled. He got a hard-on, which flailed in his pants like a broken weather vane.

  “See you tonight?” she asked. “Guest list?”

  All the girls he had known, and what good had they done him? All the twisting and turning and sweating and spewing and Tantric waiting and fast against the wall heaving and moaning and swearing and occasionally bleeding and sometimes begging, all the time looking for God this and God that. And to what spiritual profit?

  Collages of wretched pleasure contorted and spun around him. He crawled across the hall. He crawled without destination, lost in the wilderness.

  8

  JOEY WENT MARCHING down the street, dry-popped a few Tylenols, hoped that analgesics and shit-grade alcohol didn’t totally knock her out. The falling snow, which a moment ago had been freezing rain, refined her general sense of renewal and mission. She took out the slip of paper Hackney had given her with the name of his hotel on it.

  “Near here,” she said. “Right on.”

  Managers did everything for their band. Sometimes you just had to whore yourself out. She had always wanted to fuck Hackney, but now she had utility and purpose to underwrite her lust. There had to be some way around Warners’ dropping them, at least here in Europe. Euros liked cheesy stuff; they liked what American companies told them to like. All it would take was for Warners to show a little marketing muscle. All it would take was for her to ride Hackney hard enough for him to forget everything he had previously thought about them, so he’d line up with her plan and start parroting the new gospel.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Here I come, Clive fucking Owen.”

  Applejack never tasted so good. She gulped it down. Her phone rang. “Adam?”

  “Hey, Joey. I’m outside of Fritz’s. He says you owe him a whole bunch of money.”