Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  She and the Hackneyette exchanged glances. He extended a hand. “You must be Joey Fredericks.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I heard you were short, blond, and beautiful.”

  “Guilty as charged,” she said, and took his hand. “Who are you?”

  “I’m John Bridges. I manage Deena Freeze.” He motioned to the stage. “We’re opening for you tonight.”

  “Welcome to the funeral. Thanks for wearing black.”

  Bridges laughed politely, because that was default behavior.

  “We were dropped today,” she said, pushing it. “Warners dropped us. I just told the guys at dinner. So I’m feeling a little low.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Bridges said. “Terrible.”

  Bridges took a little sip of his Campari — very classy, Joey thought, very sexy — took out his Palm, and started scheduling things. Here a tap and there a tap. Joey bristled; she had dropped her Palm off the Venice Pier last week when she’d been trying to use it with greasy post–hot dog hands. Damn thing had sunk to the bottom of the bay.

  “They told us they would always be there,” Joey said, “and then they acted as if we didn’t exist. Oh, sure, people say that we screwed ourselves, that I should have kept a muzzle on Darlo. But how do you keep a muzzle on the mouthpiece?”

  Diarrhea of the mouth flowed in a stream from her lips. Bridges was caught, if only for a minute. She’d better whine fast.

  “You don’t muzzle the mouthpiece,” she continued. “That’s what you don’t do. You can’t change what you are. You’re dealt the cards and that’s what you play. We played them wrong.” She took a sip. “Why don’t you tell me what cards you were dealt, John?”

  Bridges put away his Palm, and with just as much calm as confidence — an unnerving, royal confidence — he told Joey exactly what cards he and Miss Deena Freeze had been dealt: not as good as the one that Blood Orphans had been given, but Deena was the Lady of the Lake, and no doubt she and Slick Rick here would know exactly what to do. She wouldn’t, say, take the cards, shit on them, and wipe them in the dealer’s face.

  “That is so great,” Joey said, feeling like the incredible shrinking woman. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go blow my brains out.”

  Bridges smiled, sipped his Campari all sexy-like, took his Palm back out. “Aim for the temple, Joey,” he said. “The skull’s softer there.”

  “Any other advice?”

  He pulled out a business card from his wallet. “I’ll be in LA in a few weeks. Maybe I can help you sort out all this business with the label.”

  She stared at the card. White lettering against a gold backing. So tacky it worked. “What kind of power do you have that I don’t know about?”

  “I have the good faith of the label,” he said. “It goes a long way.”

  “We have a long way to go.” She fixed a gaze on him. “All right. Sure. I mean, there’s nothing to be done, we’re fucked harder that a Hollywood hooker at dawn, but maybe you’re a magic man.”

  “I was thinking more about you,” he said. “Not so much Blood Orphans. They’re beyond help, but you might need a job, eh?”

  At that moment Joey saw it in his eyes. The player. She had no idea what he was talking about, but a tight rush up her spine told her nothing good could come of it. She was being taken; she was sure of it. She was a minor pawn in some bigger scene. For once she stood on the other side of total calculation, and felt its burning breeze on her face.

  “I have to go, London Bridges,” she said, and handed the card back. “Have to go see which member of my band needs my help. Someone must. While we still exist. While I still get to play the part.”

  He shrugged, like, Shoot yourself in the foot if that’s what you want, and smiled in a way that revealed that he might only have been trying to help out. Joey wondered when her bullshit detector had gone south on her, but then figured she’d only fooled herself into thinking she’d ever had one.

  18

  ALL THE PEP TALKS Bobby had given himself about Darlo were useless. Day after day, month after month, for almost three years, every time he had locked horns with the drummer, his horns had snapped right off.

  Passenger. He’d sat through the whole thing, and when it was over, all he’d been able to manage to do was storm off, tight in the throat, wanting to burst, to sob. I’m a runt of a man, he thought, the smallest of the litter.

  Now he stood in the Star Club, chain-smoking, drinking free Stella. Interesting that his hands didn’t itch.

  Sarah showed up. She wore some kind of handbags-and-glad-rags outfit, though the angles were still pretty tight. She gave him a big kiss.

  “How’s my rock-and-roll star?” she said, and embraced him. “How are your poor little hands?”

  “We were dropped,” he said. “Warners dropped us.”

  She frowned, and for a moment he assumed the worst. Starfucker, he thought. Now that I’m out of business, she won’t want me. She was slumming.

  “You must be very sad,” she said, and gave a reassuring kiss. “Sorry.”

  “No, no,” he said, emboldened. “I’m psyched. Now I can do whatever I want. I was a fucking prisoner and now I’m free. This is great fucking news.”

  Practice nonambiguity, he thought. It’s awful news but pretend it’s the best thing ever. Standing there with a bullshit smile on his face, Bobby thought of himself as the Terminator. He was going to have his skin stripped off, his metal guts laid bare, and get crushed in the trash compactor of failure before his desire to be famous would die.

  Thinking of himself this way, as a towering monster from the bleakest future, lifted his spirits.

  And then it turned out that her sister was fucking Shane, and psycho Marcus had cuffed Shane’s ears. That he and Shane had dipped their wicks into a very tight gene pool made him queasy, but he had gotten the good end of the deal. Clearly Danika was a thespian to the marrow, annoying and grandiose. The thespians always went for Shane. The bad girls went for Darlo. Adam got the wallflowers out on a dare. Bobby got … Darlo’s leftovers?

  No more. Never again.

  He bought Sarah a drink as Shane rushed back into the club, screaming and clutching his ears. “Fuck!” he cried, and ran into the green room.

  They waited for Danika to come barging in after him. She did not.

  “She drove him nuts,” Sarah said, and adjusted her skirt. “She suffocates her lovers. Happens all the time.”

  A few minutes later, Joey hobbled over, favoring her right leg hard, as if her left one were a prosthesis with a fracture right up the middle. She shook Sarah’s hand and then proceeded to complain about her phone.

  “I smashed it up,” she said. “It was crazy, Sarah, but I just felt like, I’m such a failure, why don’t I just kill it, sever the line, cut the cord. Just have it be me and Joey Fredericks, alone in the world. But now that I don’t have that umbilical cord, I really have to say I think I’m dying. Without that phone, I’m starving. I can’t find my other bands to see how they’re doing. That’s, like, part of my identity.” She lit a cigarette. “I’m totally without the tether. It’s, like, ground control to Major Tom!”

  “I have a cell phone,” Bobby said. With Sarah’s heat up against him, magnanimity was easy. “If you want to use it.”

  Joey stared at it, and another blond lock fell forward from her wilted Mohawk. “What’s the point?” The manager shook her head. “Forget it.”

  From far off in the distance, they heard Shane scream. Everyone turned for a second, then went back to what they were doing.

  Joey held up her hands. “Leave him for me,” she said. “I’ll take care of this.”

  Bobby and Sarah stood there rubbing up on each other as Joey hobbled off, banged through the swinging doors, and yelled to Shane that help was on the way and stop your bitching and whining. Sarah expressed amazement at the state of Blood Orphans.

  “You guys are wrecked, man.” She sipped her rum and Coke. “I thought yo
u were kidding, but no. Just a mess.”

  “Told you.”

  She lit them cigarettes. “Have you ever seen the Géricault painting Raft of the Medusa?” She passed a smoke over. “Heard of him?”

  “No. Why?”

  “It reminds me of you all.”

  “How’s that?”

  She bounced on her heels and moved her hands in the air, as if to unfold the scene. “On rough seas in the nowhere of the Atlantic,” she said, “a group of survivors from a shipwreck float on a rotting raft. They are gripping each other. Some of them are dead. Some of the dead have been eaten by the survivors. They look up at the black sky like saints, cannibal saints, God’s forgotten favorites. And at the farthest corner of the horizon there is the blip of something — a ship, maybe? They have made themselves into a human pile to get higher, and at the top of it, one man holds aloft a white handkerchief, waving to the dot they hope will be their salvation.” She rocked on her heels, and her eyes lit up.

  “We know it’s folly,” she said. “We know that this is their last cry to heaven, to fate, which has damned them, to the smallest bit of their hope, drifting away, almost invisible.” She lowered her voice. “But is it really? Sometimes I wonder about the colors in the painting. Sometimes I imagine that the colors are so beautiful because God is there, the colors are proof that soon he will swoop in and enact a miracle. Sometimes I think they will somehow manage to survive.”

  19

  JOEY FOUND SHANE in the green room, on the couch, head in hands, weeping. “Are you OK, dude?”

  “Great!” he said into his hands. “Bitch clapped me right on the ear!”

  He stumbled up, but then collapsed onto a bronze sink so big it looked like a trough. “Why?” he asked, slamming his arm into the wall. “Why why why?”

  Joey had never expected any of them to weep in front of her. Even Adam. A surge of usefulness overcame her.

  “Shane,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Whatever anger existed in Shane’s cries quickly yielded to heartache. Whatever defiance lay there, housed in the low registers of misery, changed to fast, rhythmic pulses of surrender. Listening to it, Joey thought of watching snow change to rain. Something disappeared.

  She grabbed her singer. The peanut butter smell would not stop her from giving aid. Nor the faintest hint of dog shit. She held him with much force and love.

  I must remember something happy, she thought. I must think of a good time that we have had, present a ring of good memories around him, so that these vibes will soak down through me and into him. What else can I do?

  A memory came to her — their photo shoot for the aborted Rolling Stone cover, the band dressed in silver suits with blue piping, white shirts, and blue ties on the beach in Venice. The magazine had commissioned someone to create a large papier-mâché heart, which wasn’t exactly red — more like see-through rose — and resembled an alien pod. They were to surround it, lean on it, climb aboard it, jam it into the sand like a surfboard. The picture would capture all its various prismatic features, shafts of light raining down from the sky as if to say, These fuckers are channeling it all. These four have found the ultimate delivery system of rock accuracy and beatitude. They are the inheritors of a master plan.

  The final pictures had never been shown to Joey, because in between, the racism charge had been leveled and no radio station, from Clear Channel to Infinity Broadcasting to XML Satellite, could be paid enough to run the record. But that day, no one could have imagined any of that. On that day, eighty degrees and not a cloud in the sky, they ran on the beach while onlookers gathered round, kicking sand in each other’s face, drinking beers and laughing and thinking, We will always get along because we are all members of the Elect of the Firmament of Electric Guitar, in the constellation of common time. Makeup artists painted glyphs in the corners of their eyes, floating above the subtlest of passion-red lip gloss. Adam taught Bobby how to play “Stairway to Heaven” — tried to, at least — and Darlo told stories of life on the Big Porn Candy Mountain, before giving Joey a big hug and saying, I will love you forever, babe, you’ve made this all fucking happen. Hey, everyone, she’s made this all fucking happen. She’s the one responsible! Which one of you hot bitches is going to give the manager a kiss? Shane laughed, sitting in the director’s chair, messing with the megaphone; lithe and thin-lipped, he was really starting to look like the bass player from Jane’s Addiction, skinny and sleek. He raised his megaphone to Joey and smiled.

  “OK, Blood Orphans!” the director-singer said, his voice a smooth caress. “Are you ready for your closeup?”

  Nothing bad would ever come of them. They had time for everything to happen. They had so much time to get it right. They had the entire length of life in front of them to enjoy this massive blessing. What could possibly go wrong?

  20

  SHANE WOULDN’T HAVE CHOSEN Joey’s shoulder to cry on, but wrapped up in the manager’s little hug — her body radiating a balm of lilac and lavender, her perky B-cups pressing into him — calm began to return and he went limp.

  While he cried, with Joey holding him up like a wet sack of wheat, he thought about his family. He wondered whether, upon his return, they would greet him with open arms or with judgment. He wondered if they would ask him to go to church. He thought about all his old friends, and his dog, Ranger Rick, and everything else that he had dismissed in this devil’s bargain as foul, stupid, and provincial.

  Dropped from Warner Bros. He knew it was inevitable, but now that it was here, the reality overwhelmed him. No Buddha was going to comfort him now. He felt like donkey shit on the bottom of Jesus’ sandal.

  He slid out of Joey’s clutch and fell to the thousand-euro leather couch.

  Joey lit up two cigarettes and passed one over. “Enjoy.”

  He took the smoke and watched her French-inhale, legs crossed, regal somehow in her crushed zillion-dollar suit.

  “I’m such an idiot,” he said, puffing. “I’m such a joke.”

  “Join the club,” she said. “We are all so fucking equally responsible, and, I should add, not fucking responsible for this fucking disaster. Blame is just cold comfort. Too complicated for it. Too many cooks with all their poisons, jumping over each other to throw their poison into the pot.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.” Joey stood up, smoothed herself out, adjusted her stilettos, stretched her limpy leg. “Have you seen the opening act?”

  “No. Who are they?”

  “The next big thing,” she said. “Some hot girl with an expensive stylist.”

  Shane rose, rubbed his eyes, touched his ears.

  “Sounds good,” he said. “Let’s go watch her blow us off the stage.”

  21

  BOBBY LIT A CIGARETTE. His bandages were coming loose; soon the unholy itch would begin. He and Sarah watched the opening act, who looked like the love child of Johnny Depp and Kate Bush.

  “I like her,” Sarah said. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t like airy-fairy music.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Little tough man with his bandaged hands.”

  The room had around forty people in it now, which was about thirty more than last night. The reason was onstage in all her glamtastic glory. Once she exited, the crowd would too.

  “Did you call any of your friends?” he asked Sarah. “As you can see, we could use the crowd.”

  “I did,” she said. “They said they would try.”

  “I’ve heard that before.”

  Deena Freeze finished another song and stepped to the mike. “I want to welcome a very special guest,” she said over the applause, tuning her guitar, “and a new friend up to the stage. All the way from the end of the bloody line, please welcome Adam Nickerson!”

  Adam emerged out of the shadows and took the stage. His body language was extremely un-Adam — straight-backed, long-strided, big-smiling — and he was tall. That’s right. Adam was about six foot one. Bobby had completely fo
rgotten. Why did he look so much taller?

  “His Fu Manchu is gone,” he said. “Holy shit.”

  Fucker was up there looking twice his size, all because he’d shaved. He really looked, like, ten times better. He didn’t even look like a pussy. And then Bobby really thought he was dreaming, because Adam, who normally turned to ash within two feet of a live microphone, went right up to that vintage SM57 and spoke without one iota of nerves.

  “Thanks, Deena,” he said. “Thanks a whole lot.”

  Who was this guy? Where had his wimpy guitar player gone?

  Adam’s not-mustachioed face scanned the crowd and found Joey and Shane, who were equally stunned by Adam’s new look, and then Bobby, who shrank back a little, as if he were a mole, blind and brainless, and Adam were the sun, come to snuff him out. “This song goes out to my band,” he said. “It’s an old spiritual.”

  Bobby hadn’t watched Adam from the audience since the earliest days of Blood Orphans, which only increased his sense of awe. The guy really could shred; the effortlessness covered up the utter mastery of his slide technique. You could close your eyes and think that Leadbelly was up there. Leadbelly by way of Bakersfield, in that tough, swaggering sound.

  A sense of abandonment came over the bass player. Adam had already left them. Adam was an orphan in this family too. The difference was, this family wouldn’t work without him. And they could keep the mustache.

  How could he not root for the guy?

  “Yes!” Joey yelled as Adam nailed a crazy Stevie-Ray-Vaughn-meets-Jimmy-Page kind of solo, the kind every teenage kid alone in his room with a cheap Japanese Strat and a Fender Twin aspired to approximate for half a second. But Adam didn’t even need to glance at the fretboard.

  “Awesome!” Shane yelled out. Bobby watched the singer double- and triple-take, his expression one of total delight. “Way to go!”

  “Yeah, Adam!” Joey said, standing next to Shane. She held up her drink. “All right all right all right!”