Rock Bottom (11 page)
Joey had introduced the band, just like old times, but the carny-circus-show-barker routine resonated not one bit with the Swedes. To them, she was just some American in a herring-salad-stained suit who spoke loudly and made stupid promises, like her president. They stared and booed. Someone screamed “Nazi oil thugs, go home!” Joey ranted like the Big Bopper, Robin Williams, and Huey Long cramped into one Drew Barrymore-esque tart from the San Fernando Valley, and knew, for the first time since Blood Orphans had been born, that she had wildly overestimated her charm.
The band sauntered onstage. Shane had really become the anti-Shane by this point, without any semblance of the earnest and sweet New Fundamentalist Baptist Church parishioner. Now he was just an emaciated waif wearing torn cotton, grade-Z leather, and eye shadow.
He looked out from sad, underfed, forsaken eyes.
“Good evening, tall Swedish people,” he said. “We’re Blood Orphans and we do not support the war in Iraq. In fact, we agree with you that it is the most craven act yet from an already craven, power-drunk administration. We want to make that clear.
I
want to make that clear. For it is most certainly written, in the religion that I grew up in, Christianity, that one must respect all races and faiths, and …”
The band had started to play over him, a midtempo number called “Landing Strip Blues (’Taint What You Think),” a common tactic the other three used to get Shane to stop his monologues. Sometimes they had to cycle the same opening of a song for ten minutes, until Shane grew bored and caught the boat as it came round, segueing into the vocals. But that night Gandhi just kept talking.
“I mean, I grew up in a microeconomy of armaments, in Orange County, and my dad was an engineer at Lockheed. You guys don’t understand what it’s like to, uh, grow up in that kind of military-industrial shadow complex, because your government doesn’t actually sell weapons. I mean, I don’t know what the main industry is here, besides snow and hot blondes, but …”
Joey stood behind the stage, horrified. Adam and Bobby stood in their corners, statues in this torture garden, and cycled the chord progression. Darlo bared his teeth. Every time they came around for the verse to start, he would count out, as if a little orientation were all Shane needed. But Preacher Shane’s train kept a-rollin’.
“Certainly in books I’ve been reading, like the Kama Sutra and
The Seventeen Storey Mountain,
wait, I mean
Seven Storey Mountain,
issues of peace are first off the most important. That’s what good books teach, peace. Any of you girls down here want to show me your idea of peace? But I’m serious, I’m just as upset as you with the war. It’s so lame. You know. Uh. Maybe it is
Seventeen Storey Mountain.
”
Joey watched the Swedish kids start to fume. Darlo chucked a drumstick at Shane, but it missed and ricocheted into the face of some girl in the front row. She yelped and dropped, and that got Shane on board. He jumped in like a bargain-basement Jerry Lee Lewis:
It’s the big uh-huh ah-ha! the part between the yin and
the yang.
It’s kind of sweet, it’s got a precious tang.
I go down there to read between the lines,
When I’m on my way to that sweet meaty bee-hind.
I heard about it from a cool cool gal,
She had a brother named Six-Dinner Sal.
Forsooth! she said, Go now and taste that plunder.
Don’t be a Johnny-one-note when you’re down under!
All four of them jumped in for the refrain.
It ain’t here, and it ain’t there!
It has the smell of just ’bout everywhere.
It’s a full-on combo-nation of sin and pride,
It’s the motherfuckin’ altar of her Lower East Side.
It’s the Taint! It’s the Taint! It’s the Taint!
Swedish faces, dumb with disgust.
It’s the Taint! Makes me Faint! It’s the Taint!
Every time the band yelled “Taint!” Joey felt the temperature in the room drop. Blood Orphans was supposed to be a joke; no matter how offensive the lyrics, they were to be delivered with a smile and a wink. But touring had dredged the joy of the music right out of the band, and now the lyrics rode in on the scaly wings of scorn and hostility. When Shane began the last verse, Joey watched the Swedish faces lose all semblance of color. So did hers. Darlo had rewritten the lyrics for the occasion. Shane grabbed the mike and bent in:
Sometimes I think that NATO is all shit.
You Europeans, you Swedes, are the pits.
Why do we keep on giving you schmucks a pass?
Grow some stones and save your own sorry ass.
But wait, I think I lost the plot or two.
This ain’t no song about no
Pierre le Fou.
It’s about the places that I like to go,
With all you natural-blond babes right after the show.
It’s the Taint! No restraint! It’s the Taint!
The Swedish faces hardened, their days of neutrality over.
It’s the Taint! Makes me faint! It’s the Taint! The Taint!
The Taint!
The song ended, ushering in howls and boos and a hail of plastic cups.
“Stock-mother-fucking-holm!” Bobby said. “Good evening!”
A female voice lobbed a Swedish-toned grenade from the back of the hall. “Fuck you, American scum!”
Shane laughed, locking eyes with a male member of the audience, and thrust his hips a few times. Shane had been a sweet kid — all full of religion, perhaps, and kind of naive, but without a bad bone in his body — and now he was an underfed, leering monster who had embraced the persona of obnoxious rock star, one who resembled Sebastian Bach in his “AIDS Kills Fags Dead” stage.
“You want a piece of this?” he asked the audience member. “I’ll have your little girlfriend instead.”
Another verbal mortar sailed over no-man’s-land. “Go home, Blood Orphans!”
This soon became a chant, like at a football match.
“Go home, Blood Orphans!”
“I think they want us to go home,” Darlo said into the microphone.
“I think so,” Shane replied, surveying the crowd. “What do you think, Adam?”
Adam looked up from his guitar. Come on, Adam, Joey thought, you’re the voice of sanity and professionalism. Bring it down a notch.
“Fuck ’em,” Adam said. “Let’s play ‘Hella-Prosthetica.’ ”
“He hath spoken!” Bobby yelled, and mangled the opening bass line.
Shane continued to taunt the front row as the band started up a song about having sex with a girl without legs, a song much more offensive than the ones that had earned them the racist tag. The singer posed in a torch song affectation, holding the mike gingerly in his hands while giving the front row the finger. Joey hoped that these were, at heart, mild-mannered Swedes who would never deign to take Shane’s bait.
Two tall, thin, equine boys jumped onstage and tackled him.
Before the mike thumped to the ground, Shane’s surprised laughter moved through the hall like the last amazed gasp of a man going under.
Darlo trampled up and over his drums, a West Hollywood warlord out in the wilderness, happy finally to have cause to attack the natives. One of the Swedes squared up to meet him and received a bull’s-eye kick to the groin, a kick underwritten by the full-body frustration of a profoundly tweaked son of a pornography empire. One perfect kick to the crotch and the whole crowd jumped onstage.
Guitars and microphones hit the ground and fed back, slathering the riot in steel noise.
Of course now Joey had to get into it. She had to have their back. So she ran to the dressing room and hid behind a couch.
The Swedish police were exceedingly polite. They escorted the band to the Stockholm Grand Hyatt and asked for autographs.
“Finally!” Darlo said, blotting a bloody lower lip back in the hotel room. “Something to get us on
MTV News!
”
“Yeah, great,” Joey said, gunning a Carlsberg. “You wish.”
Darlo threw an empty bottle at her. “Shut up, you fucking coward. Jesus, how much of a pussy could one girl be? Take your heels off and get in the fucking ring, Joey. Even Adam got my back. Adam!”
Bobby took his hands out of an ice bucket. “Did you see me bite that guy!” He whooped and threw his hairy hobbit feet on the coffee table. “It was awesome!”
Now, traffic swirled around Joey. She dodged and weaved and favored her right leg. Darlo’s voice in that Stockholm hotel room rang in her head, accusing, indignant, and unappreciative.
Yeah, Bobby, she thought.
Awesome.
A school of Dutch male fish rode by, so close that Joey smelled their cologne. There were certain scents, apparently, that never made it to the States. Certain scents that had never been on the same acres as a pesticide. These guys smelled like new grass. They smelled great.
This isn’t easy for anyone,
Hackney had said.
We wanted to make this work.
“I’m worthless,” she said, and hobbled toward the Van Gogh Museum.
ADAM STOOD IN MORTEN’S
bathroom, meditating on his newfound contempt. Fun as it was, he wouldn’t let his contempt consume him. The way to happiness was through peace with that which you cannot contain, said Professor Harold Sweet, the head of Adam’s open studio his first year at CalArts. Sweet was a wizened old man who had studied with De Kooning and partied with Pollock, so everyone hung on his every word.
“Art informed by ego is trash,” he said, and tapped his cane. “You can never escape cliché if you are using art to assert yourself. You can never justify your existence on earth with your art. It’s not real then. It’s not universal. How can the universal and the ego coexist?”
Adam counted to ten, stared at himself in the mirror. He stroked his Fu Manchu and brushed his teeth and hummed one of his favorite guitar parts, the soaring solo in Tom Petty’s “The Waiting,” where Mike Campbell turns sorrow into sunrise.
“Art and anger are not bedmates,” said Professor Sweet, leaning over Adam’s canvas, pointing at his painting of a face not unlike his father’s. “That is the anger of your ego informing your work, resulting in undue force.” He grabbed Adam’s hand. “This isn’t a portrait. You’re not using the brush to draw out the figure. You’re using it just to hack at the face. Are you trying to leave scars?”
But you couldn’t apply these truths to rock and roll. Rock and roll was ego and anger and the universal mashed together in struggle, shoving their way around the head of a pin, fighting for the smallest prime emotional bandwidth.
How many times had he said he would leave? How many times had he threatened, in that reedy little voice of his, only to be laughed at?
“Leave?” Darlo said. “And do what? Go back to painting your little paintings and working in a coffee shop? Now that you’ve got your quarter mil? Please.”
He dressed and went outside, called Joey and persuaded her to meet him at the Van Gogh. Those times with Joey, roaming through the museums while he talked about Truth and Meaning and she hit on young museum attendants, always cheered both of them up. One time in the Guggenheim Bilbao he’d pondered the genius curves of Frank Gehry’s architecture while Joey did some dude in the bathroom.
He went into the café. Behind the counter, a middle-aged dreadlocked guy smoked a clove and read the paper. His dreads ran almost down to the small of his back. They looked like the broken arms of a giant spider.
“You are another one of the band, yeah? The Blood Orphans?” He stuck out his hand. “I am Ullee.”
“Adam.” They shook hands. “Hi.”
“Your bandmate was in here … an hour ago, maybe? Bobby?”
“The guy with the ripped-up hands?”
“That’s right.” He drew Adam two shots and squinted from the smoke of his clove. “We talked. Nice young man. But those hands …” He shivered in disgust.
“It’s actually really sad,” Adam said. “Bobby’s completely screwed up. His hands are an expression of that.”
“Yes, man, completely,” Ullee said. Apparently that was the Dutch way of saying
whatever.
“How’s the coffee?”
“A delight.”
Adam was pleased to meet Ullee. Like so many Europeans, he seemed to be missing that underlying principle of aggression that marked Americans.
“So many American bands,” Ullee said, “they come in here to get their breakfast and check their faraway e-mails. They complain about Morten and how cold his apartment is. They do seem so very sad.”
“They are,” Adam said. “Touring is miserable unless you’re famous.”
“Ah yes, if you were U2, that would be fantastic!” Ullee looked at Adam as if they’d just come upon a truth together. “Fantastic, man. But still, there must be something good that happens on the road, no?” He motioned to a stool. “Why not tell me about it, hmm? One good story, ah?”
A story? He had no story for Ullee. He didn’t want to revel in the misery of a terminal group psychology that had long since scarred him enough. He wanted to spend the day in Amsterdam, this last day of what had to be their last tour, going out on a good note. He was going to stay above the fray.
“Sorry, Ullee,” he said. “No new tales to tell.”
“Ah, yes, OK,” Ullee said. “Sick of talking about it, no doubt.”
“Yeah. That’s right.” He laid down a fat tip. “Could you tell me where I could rent a bike?”
He had weathered the storm of the months of bullshit, and now he was but one show away from freedom. All the times that he’d thought of quitting, promised, sworn up and down that he would, only to find himself tongue-tied and backtracking when he saw Darlo’s thug face: he’d cursed himself for being such a doormat, but now he felt as if he’d suffered through to a more evolved state. He could leave this band with his integrity intact, without telling strangers stories of woe, without submitting to the weakness of complaint. He could walk by that bombed-out clubhouse,
Blood Orphans
spray-painted above the doorway, with his head held high, proud of what he had done and how he had acted as a participant in, if not a member of, this band. Couldn’t he?
SHANE STARED AT
his phone. He hated it when Bobby hung up on him. If he couldn’t exert some kind of power over his most despised compatriot, then this was going to be a shitty day indeed.