Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  “You cried in a girl’s mouth?” Jesse said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know, dude,” Darlo said. “I’m falling apart. So what do you say? Please go look down there. Please?”

  He waited. He waded through static and gulls and satellites.

  “Sorry, man,” Jesse said. “I just can’t get involved.”

  “You’re already involved, shithead,” he said. “You’ve been involved for years. And I’ll fucking tip you off to the fucking LAPD if you say no. They’ll be my new best friends after I bust this sex-slave ring. I’ll fucking do it, Jesse.”

  “Will you?”

  “Yeah, I will. This is a big deal. Lives are at stake, man, and you are not going to get in the way by playing it like a fucking Boy Scout!”

  The silence between them ferried Darlo’s righteousness. He smiled and waited for contrition.

  “Fuck you, Darlo,” Jesse said, and hung up.

  Darlo waited for Jesse to call back. He wasn’t serious. He wouldn’t dare. But no call came.

  All that pimping for the drug dealer and this is how he got thanked.

  Some band that looked like the Black Crowes came strutting out of the elevator. They had their fake furs and revealed chests and greasy haircuts, not to mention an entire modeling agency on their arms. Anger roiled his guts. These dudes weren’t sleeping in some stranger’s cold apartment; they probably had the entire top floor of the Krasna-go-fuck-yourself. They laughed together in a way Blood Orphans never had.

  Joey came rushing by, hobbling with gimpy grace. “Come on, babe,” she said. “Dinner.”

  “In five,” Darlo said, and dialed McFadden. He had to redial five times before the lawyer picked up the phone.

  “Peek-a-boo,” Darlo said. “Me again.”

  He heard traffic. He smelled LA all over the phone.

  “Why are you calling again?” McFadden said. “I haven’t done anything since we talked but sleep, and barely that. Your dad —”

  Darlo stopped him with the theory.

  “Jesus, Darlo.”

  “It’s true. You think that girl’s lying?”

  “They’re trying to scare him. It’s bait to get him talking. To get me talking.”

  “No, Bob, all true. You think she made the whole fucking thing up?”

  “I’ll say that when they find who knows what in her system, it’ll be very hard to establish probable cause for a warrant. Goddamnit, I’m his lawyer, Darlo. I’m not … I’m in traffic here … I can’t even have this conversation.”

  “The fuck you can’t. You’ve been having these conversations for years.”

  McFadden hung up on him. Darlo called back. “Don’t hang up on me!”

  “I went into a tunnel, Darlo.”

  “Oh.”

  Static over the Irish Sea. Snow in the Rockies.

  “So what do you think? I’m not crazy, Bob.”

  McFadden yelled at another driver. The high pitch of a horn passed. “I give you huge marks for creativity, Darlo,” he said. “But forget it.”

  “The fuck I will. Put two and two together. How long have you known my dad? Are you about to tell me that the old fuck is above some kind of reproach?”

  “Ah, what a beautiful day it is, here, Darlo,” McFadden said. “Let’s talk about the weather instead.”

  “And you know what he’s into,” Darlo continued. “You know that he likes to hurt girls, how he likes to tie them up and gangbang them. He pays them for group fucking, but then he gets scary.”

  McFadden made a sort of negating moan. Darlo felt himself struggle over that familial horizon, pour light onto the surface of his soul, trying to resist his damned ancestral latitude just one extra moment yet feeling the turning of the earth, the turning of the sky.

  “I haven’t even had my orange juice yet,” McFadden said. “You’re losing me, Darlo.”

  “I’ll say it again. There was this girl —”

  “I’ll say it again, I can’t have this conversation.”

  “— and she was in the dungeon that I told you about —”

  “Darlo.”

  “— and Dad had those fucking mobsters over, and I helped him install the damn thing so I know it’s there — No, don’t hang up on me again, dude!”

  He dialed McFadden again. A message.

  “What tunnel are you in now, dude? Well, when you get out of it, why don’t you call the police, because there’s a girl, at least one girl, probably more, and she’s in trouble, she’s being held against her will. Damn it, Bob, if only for the thirty grand you got handed for waving your hand over our contract, fucking get on it. Do something! Save those girls! Help me!”

  All the fine-suited people, Dutchies and tourists alike, tried to ignore him, but curiosity forced them to stare. And so he turned to the silent crowd and told them to call the media in Los Angeles, call every police officer they knew, tell them that the son of the porn king David Cox says there’s a dungeon below their house at 21 Camellia Drive, a hidden dungeon where girls are imprisoned, just call everyone you know there and tell them that his father is a psychopath. Tell them he’s the sickest fuck in a city of sick fucks. Tell them to excavate that basement!

  Salt in his mouth. Wet eyes. Was he yelling? Was he?

  “Oh my fucking God!” one of the members of that Black Crowes band said as their groupies covered their mouths, amazed.

  The ancestral line snapped and set him free from the horizon. He heard the shatter of wire, felt the tether fray to nothing, dissolve, burn off. He floated up over the world. His latitude changed. His meridian altered. More sky. More sun. Up from the canyon. Not running anymore. Not running.

  13

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Bobby sat at their table in the Krasnapolsky restaurant, thinking how close he was to pulling off this day of extreme good fortune. All he had to do was get through the show and make sure Sarah didn’t meet Darlo, or if she did, to keep it short. Across the table, the drummer sipped a beer, peeled the bottle, looking as if he’d crawled up out of his own grave. This was El Darlo? This was the conqueror of pussy, the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla?

  Dad gets busted. Kryptonite. See ya.

  They sat in the restaurant, the four of them, waiting for Joey to come back from the bathroom. Bobby had been the first there; then Shane came down stinking of Joey’s perfume, which was just fine because the guy stank of beer wrestling with body odor wrestling with a nasty hint of old peanut butter; then Adam, with that default expression of dull politeness; and then Joey and Darlo. The manager made Adam and Bobby change seats.

  “I have this all planned out,” she said, a mad scientist wiping her little button nose. “You can’t sit there. Sit here. Bobby, you have to.” She wiped her eyes. “Adam, get over here, please. I have this all planned out.”

  “Planned out?” Shane said. “What’s wrong with you? And who’s Revvy at Guild Records?”

  “He has a label based in Rotterdam,” she said. “He’s supposed to come to the show tonight. So play well.”

  “Why?” Bobby asked. “So we can be the next big thing in a country no one cares about? I’d rather sweep the floors in hell.”

  Joey ignored him. She touched her fork and knife and looked solemnly at Adam. “Are you OK?”

  He nodded.

  “OK about what?” Shane asked. “What happened to your face?”

  Joey jumped up, smoothed out her suit, adjusted her earrings.

  “Be right back. OK. Order some drinks. Be right back.”

  Adam’s expression wasn’t one Bobby had seen before. Despite the cuts on his face and his black eye, the old velvet emperor had some kind of serene glow, the kind Shane had spent his whole life searching for, the state of oneness the singer constantly spoke about, lecturing everyone in reverential terms. The guitar player had scored a red-hot dose of fat Buddha science, and floated in waves of peace.

  Bobby wanted to taunt Shane with this, but found himself unable, in deference to Adam’s vibe.


  “I was attacked by skinheads,” Adam said, the way you say, Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. “I thought they were going to kill me. Joey and Darlo kicked their fucking asses.”

  “Did you just curse?” Bobby said. “Holy shit, the fairy godmother just cursed.”

  “Those fucking pricks,” Darlo growled, surfacing. “I would have eaten their fucking faces.”

  Bobby and Shane exchanged comic buddy glances. Another first.

  “I don’t forget when people help me,” Darlo said. “I am loyal. I am really fucking loyal. I am not my dad. Fucking really loyal and sometimes that sucks, but sometimes I can actually help someone. And that’s what I wanted to do, Adam. Help you, dude.”

  Adam nodded, and whispered affirmatives. Darlo looked at Adam with something like affection. Another first. Everyone was trying on new emotions, preparing themselves for a post–Blood Orphans world.

  “Ouch,” Shane said, and touched his ears. A big, flaky piece of something dropped from his scalp.

  “What the hell is that?” Bobby stared at the reddish chunk. “Is that blood?”

  “Peanut butter.”

  “Why is it red?”

  Shane looked up, touching his ears as if he didn’t think they were there. “I got beat up, sort of, by this crazy dad.”

  “Dude.” Bobby reached out and touched Shane’s shoulder. “Dude.”

  “I am loyal,” Darlo said once more. “I am.”

  When Joey returned, wiping coke from her nose, the era of good feeling went dead. Her failure vibe brought it all back home. Bobby felt his fake tooth, remembered the punch, the blood, the utter humiliation the singer had hoisted upon him in that Super 8, day after day, the Mummy this and Darlo’s Right-Hand-Man that, the embarrassment every show when Shane went into his pathetic religious screeds, strutting around like some preacher at the school of Jesus Is Way Cool. And so he retreated from the borders of Kindlakhastan and back into his embattled fiefdom, into his damp castle, where eczema lined the walls like matted moss.

  “This is like a last fucking supper, huh?”

  Shane’s smile disappeared, and he looked confused.

  “If one of us is Jesus,” the singer said.

  “I bet you’d like that,” Bobby replied. “If you were Jesus.”

  “Uh …” Shane shrugged. “Sure?”

  “Yeah,” the bass player said, not really sure what he was talking about. The retreat to the castle was going badly; his feet were stuck in the boggy moat of change. He had managed to confuse even himself. His hands pulsed as confirmation of this flailing strategy, this failure ever to assume power in the band enacted in miniature. All this change between them, happening so fast, portending the end of them as a functioning traveling unit of misery. Without misery, they weren’t a band. Which he wanted. Which he didn’t want. Which he dreaded. He dipped his hand into a glass of water, leaving behind a film of muck and moisturizer, and flicked water at Darlo.

  “How’s your dad?” Bobby asked. “Heard he got bizusted.”

  Darlo looked up. The drummer’s eyes were teary. The drummer had feelings.

  “Dude,” Darlo said with uncustomary low volume. “Give it a rest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you’re doing that thing where you just talk and make no sense. Where your fucking mood changes on a dime.”

  “I don’t do that.”

  Shane laughed.

  “Just kill it,” Darlo said, and even though his voice was still and soft, each word felt like a hand rubbing Bobby’s face deeper into shit shame. “Spare us the extended tour into your pathetic, fucked-up mind.”

  The emotional space into which Bobby fell was soft, silty, moist. He looked at Adam, who still had that new map of Happyville drawn on his face, quickening the trajectory of Bobby’s fall. While they were busy falling apart, Adam had acquired some clear, well-lit pathway to another world. The guitar player had a look on his face that was pure future tense.

  All the other group dinners with Joey had been triumphs. Deal this and licensing that and tour with just take a guess you will be so fucking psyched. It hurt all of them to be here, to sing fucking “Taps.”

  “Dude,” Darlo asked Shane, “what do you want to play tonight?”

  “Are you asking me what I want to play?” Shane said, amazed. “Are you really asking me? Because I will tell you.”

  “Don’t labor it,” Bobby said. “Just tell him.”

  Darlo turned and looked at him like a dragon rudely awakened from sleep, looking for bones with which to pick his teeth. Smaug was here, and Bobby had forgotten his bow and arrow.

  “I wasn’t asking you,” the drummer said. “No one gives a fuck what you think.”

  Shane nodded, like, Damn. Adam sipped water. Bobby’s throat went tight.

  “No one,” Darlo said, “has ever cared what you think. Not from the first note we played. Not when we were trying to figure out what to call the record. Not when we were constructing song lists. Not when we were having a good time way the fuck back when, when we all pretended to give a good hard shit about what the fuck you thought.” Darlo closed his eyes and fluttered them open as if he were trying to stay awake. “Do you know what Sheridan said about you? He said you wouldn’t know a good bass melody if Paul McCartney fucked you in the ass with it. Mr. Producer-Man said you were a fucking passenger.”

  The P-word.

  “We laughed about it all the time. I mean, Sheridan and I hated each other, that stoner moron, but we could always bond over what a passenger you were. He asked when I was going to fire you.”

  Pathetic. Poseur. Perfunctory.

  “ ‘When are you going to get a real bass player?’ he said. ‘Bobby just can’t go the distance.’ ”

  Bobby fell down and down. The drummer’s voice snatched up every bit of his happiness in its dragon maw and crushed it.

  “Kind of fucked up to say it at all,” Darlo said. “Kind of pointless. But you oughta know, Bobby, that no one cared whether or not you made the cut. You just got lucky is all. You just got lucky.”

  14

  WHATEVER BAD NEWS JOEY HAD for them, Adam was feeling pretty fucking great right now. The worse the news, the better, really. A sense of freedom had lit in Adam as the tour drew to a close, like a little pilot light looking for some gas to turn it into a full flame. That flame had been stoked by Deena Freeze and her slick manager, awed by his chops and stunned by his talent. That flame had been the look the two had given each other, a look of surprise, and joy. So the worse the news out of Joey, who sat there chewing her nails, a condemned woman about to receive her punishment, the better.

  When he returned to LA, he would do a series of paintings called The Bidding War, in which these lowly apostles were visited by various spirits of the rock-and-roll ether, demons both petty and grand, like old wraiths of biblical temptation: the hoary Witch of Warner Bros., the black-winged Saruman of Sire, the dank Balrog of Bertelsmann, come as emissaries from worlds of wonder with contracts and codicils. These tempters all had the Vision and swore they also had the Execution. In the painting, they would sit in the reverse formation of how they now sat, with Darlo and Shane near the A&R action and Bobby and Adam at the fringes. Of course, this time the action was no action at all. It was just their manager, Joey Jane Fredericks, having just come back from a twenty-minute trip to the bathroom, here to untie the knot for good.

  “Warners dropped Blood Orphans today,” she said. “They sent John Hackney. Remember him?” She swigged her Grolsch and bent over the table as if they were wily thieves in a medieval tavern, plotting a highway heist over steins of hearty grog. “I want you to know I’m going to fight it. With all my heart and soul, I’m going to fight to keep Blood Orphans on the Warner roster. We will prevail.” She banged the table. “We will prevail.”

  She sat back, arms crossed, expecting someone to join the insurrection. But no one did. Adam thought of Instructor Samuels in his second-year atelier, talkin
g about how every painting must construct a narrative. Joey was trying to create a portrait of defiance, but no one was going along.

  “You guys aren’t just going to roll over, are you?” She held up her hands. “Is that all that this band means to you?”

  Four faces, exhausted, stared her down.

  “Amazing,” she said. “I was thinking that you guys would care about staying with a label with global reach and distribution. I was thinking that maybe you’d want the giant steel arm of the Time Warner empire at your back. I thought that maybe —”

  “Shut up, Joey,” Bobby said. “I can’t take the speech right now.”

  She looked at them, furious. “That’s it?” she said. “No fight left? That’s it?”

  “What do you want us to say?” Shane said. “Fuck Warners? What choice do we have?”

  Tears ran down her face. “The choice to fight.”

  They just laughed at that one.

  She threw down her napkin, got up, and hobbled out of there. Adam saw how Joey had changed; she who had once loomed huge now resembled a hollow piece of show-biz balsa wood. In the end, he thought, she was the one who had lost the most in the whole mess. At least they had lived the dream. They’d carry that with them forever. All Joey had were the receipts, sums due and owing.

  “Assholes!” she yelled, her voice echoing through the atrium.

  15

  JOEY STORMED OFF in a furious hobble. They watched the gimp clip-clop away, yelling obscenities and bumping into tables.

  Dropped? Darlo thought. Sure, Joey, whatever. He had bigger problems right now.

  But then he got stuck on that word. Dropped?

  Oh, that’s what it was. A ploy. They were just trying to cut her out. When he got back to the States and charged up his cell phone, there’d be a message from Steadman, long-lost Steadman, waiting for him with the score. They were cleaning house and wanted to bring in a new manager. It was a Joey purge. Their lawyers had it all planned out. McFadden was withholding until his return. Joey’s lost her touch, he’d say. We have to let her go. But we still believe in Blood Orphans.