Rock Bottom (16 page)

“We might record our next record out in the desert,” he said. He had never spoken of the next record, never really pondered it. “One of the guys from Queens of the Stone Age has a studio out there, and he said we could record any time we wanted.”

“I like Queen,” she said. “Freddie Mercury is so great.”

“No, Queens of the Stone Age,” he said, starting to jog along to keep up with her skipping. She was a little sprite, all right. Her body, a sinuous little piece, was built for speed, not comfort. Bobby thought about all that red hair going up and down on his crotch, then chastised himself, then quit thinking about anything because she was skipping even faster.

“Could you slow down?” he asked.

She laughed. “Come on, Bobby. We’re almost there!”

She skipped as if she were on one of those airport conveyor belts, and he barely kept up, thinking about the time in St. Louis when he had chased a Goth brunette with big tits and a clit ring all over the room of a Motel 6, while Darlo threw up next door after losing a drinking contest with some old biker. That had been an event of supreme satisfaction.

They stopped at a corner. A tram lumbered by. She stole a glance at his hands.

“I saw that.”

“Sorry.” She sashayed a little and took one of the mitts in her gentle palms. “Don’t be mad, but I don’t know why it doesn’t make me sick.”

Bobby stared into her eyes and thought,
She must not meet Darlo.

“Come on,” she said, “Dr. Guttfriend is waiting for us.”

They passed a man lying on the sidewalk, a young man, strung out, who looked just enough like Shane to fill him with glee. He imagined the singer, dead on the concrete, mouth open and filling with flies, Captain Condescending Christian Buddhist Fuckwit being eaten alive by minions of Satan.

Sarah stopped in front of a modern-looking building, the kind that in America would have been a constant target of mockery.

“We’re here,” she said.

Dr. Guttfriend’s office ghost-smelled of baby vomit, despite the fact that it was germ-freak clean. Toys were neatly stacked, and the white walls were covered with images of the smiling toddlers of socialized medicine.

“Is he a children’s doctor or something?” Bobby asked.

She nodded.

“How are old are you, Sarah?”

“I’ll be nineteen on December fifth.” She made a face. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-six. I was just making sure that you were street-legal.”

Her brow tightened. She didn’t know what
street-legal
meant, but she sure knew the letchy tone. That tone was global. Every woman recognized it.

“I’ll let him know we’re here,” she said, and went through a door.

Stupid ass, Bobby chastised himself. She’s a great girl. She’d never be a Blood Orphans fan. You don’t talk to normal girls like that. Darlo must
never fucking meet her.

He scratched his right hand, loosening the bandages. He scratched and scratched. Stupid guy, you’re so fucking stupid. Always say the stupid thing. Always have to ruin everything. Some bandages detached, flapping like untethered sails in choppy water. Fucking stupid jerk. Ruin everything stupid fucking band never going home ever it’ll never end oh fuck that feels so fuck-ing g-good —

“Hey,
stop,
” Sarah said, and grabbed his hands. “Stop, Bobby. He’s ready. Let’s go in.”

Dr. Guttfriend looked like Mr. Rogers with a big bushy Euro tache. He stuck out his hand, and then he saw what he was dealing with and put the hand on Bobby’s shoulder. His face contracted just a touch. Even doctors, Bobby thought. Even fucking doctors.

In the examination room, Guttfriend tried to make small talk but stared at Bobby’s hands like they were the missing dermatologic link.

“Eczema, eczema,” the good doctor said like an incantation, putting his hand to his chin in a thoughtful pose. “Such a mysterious ailment. How long have you had …”

He gingerly took one of Bobby’s hands in his, then said something in Dutch a few times.

“Sorry, I don’t speak Dutch,” Bobby said. “What are you saying?”

Guttfriend looked at Sarah, like, Where have you been trolling, little girl?

She said something in Dutch, and Guttfriend smiled at Bobby.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Please, go on.”

Bobby gave him the backstory, and Guttfriend examined his hands, nodding and tapping his pen on his cheek. Bobby watched the lymph grow in the wells of his cuticles and saw the yellow stains it made on the bandages. His right hand was more inflamed than the left, but the left had more open sores. His wrists looked much too small to be connected to his inflamed hands, and Dr. Guttfriend seemed to express displeasure at the mention of cortisone.

“Cortisone appears to work, but it only undermines the condition in the long run. It makes the outer
dehr
mis fragile, like onion skin.”

“Well, it has saved my ass.”

“But not enough, as you can see.”

Bobby looked up at the posters of the little kids, going Dutch tra-la-la down a sunny northern European street. “I mean, I don’t know what I would do when the itch comes. It’s like a wave taking me out. It’s so powerful.”

“You’ve tried cod liver oil?”

“Bottles of it.”

“Cutting out coffee?”

“Check.”

“Avoiding nuts and wheat?”

“Like a carnivore.”

“Not scratching?”

“Oh, never,” Bobby said, and he and Guttfriend laughed like old friends.

Finally, Bobby thought, someone who understood. This was the most fun he’d had on this tour. He felt like the two of them were priests talking theology.

“When did you say your hands became unmanageable?”

“Sometime on the third tour.”

“When was that?”

“About a year ago.”

Dr. Guttfriend nodded, and Sarah grabbed Bobby’s shoulder. “Your hands have been like this for a year?” she said. “Bobby, no.”

“You get used to it.”

“That’s crazy, babe.”

Bobby’s world always froze for a second when a girl called him
babe
for the first time.

“You can’t live like that,” she continued, and looked at Guttfriend. “Please do something.”

He had the strangest feeling, a heat on the left side of his face, the warmth of a fireplace in a ski lodge, rosy and comforting. Sarah was there, lying in front of the flames, wrapped naked in a bearskin rug. She gave him a look.

“I could refer Sarah to a dermatologist,” Guttfriend said. “How long are you in Amsterdam?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tonight’s our last night, and then I don’t know what’s going to happen.” He turned to her. “I have a plane reservation for tomorrow, but I could change it.”

Sarah nodded ever so slightly and smiled, showing her teeth, her ivory jewels. Bobby thought of tulip fields and his face on an EU passport. His hands pulsed like a go-ahead.

“I could change it,” he said. “Why don’t you give us his name?”

11

DARLO CRAMPED HIMSELF
into the small Dutch phone booth, green and covered with KPN logos, holding Joey’s fat phone in his hand while she sat next door in a bar. He felt private in there, free of Joey’s all-seeing gaze. Fucking thing weighs a ton, he thought, and popped the phone against the green handset, making a crack down the middle.

Bob McFadden, the Cox family lawyer, picked up on the fifth ring.

“Why are you calling me in the middle of the night, Darlo?”

McFadden, the old family counsel who’d seen them through Ed Meese and John Ashcroft and two investigations for syndicalism. The guy who’d collected thirty grand in fees for negotiating the Blood Orphans contract and then applied exactly zero pressure to Warners when they dropped the ball.

“Don’t sound too excited.”

“You woke me up,” McFadden said. “How do you want me to sound?”

Fucking McFadden, Darlo thought. On this day, where my dad lands in the clink, you should be up around the clock, hauling legal ass.

“Look, Bob,” he said, “what’s the deal? I’m in fucking Amsterdam and none of my cards work. I can’t access any money.”

“Your dad —”

“I know,
I know,
Bob.”

“Don’t you want to know how he’s doing?”

“Fuck him. I can’t get my money because of him. Why can’t I, Bob?”

McFadden did that lawyer sigh. “I can’t believe he didn’t tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“That when the DA froze all his accounts, yours would freeze too.”

“When the DA … Did you know that this was coming?”

He groaned. A bed creaked. “Yeah, Darlo. I did. So did he.”

Static overrode them. Weather shifts over the North Sea. Seagulls over the Arctic. Wasn’t the idea with this thousand-dollar phone that you avoided interference?

“Well, he didn’t tell me.” He kicked the wall. “I can’t believe he’d do this to me. He said the money would be safer tied to his.”

Another lawyer sigh. “In all honesty, Darlo, I don’t know why you would ever have taken that to mean anything.”

That hurt like a paper cut. Implying that his dad took advantage of him. It hurt, Darlo knew, because it was true.

“Yeah, well, then why didn’t you tell me how stupid that was?” he said. “I mean, aren’t you my lawyer too? I mean, like how much have you leached off us and now you can’t help?”

“Darlo,” he said, “I’m not a magician.”

“No, but you are a crooked little fuck.”

Another lawyer sigh.

“Stop with the fucking lawyer sighs. I fucking hate those.”

“Look,” McFadden said. “I know you’re upset. I wish I could help. There’s nothing I can do. But this business with the missing girl —”

“What business?”

“The girl that showed up yesterday at the Encino precinct who said she’d escaped from the house of a man named Jeffrey Brown, who’d been keeping her in a dungeon. She named a number of men as part of a sex-slave ring. Your dad was one of them.”

Darlo felt a gust of sulfurous wind shoot through him. He turned in the booth, fast, as if some noxious ghost had just blown into his ear. A hot ball of memory threw him over, lathered him up, flattened him out.

“Darlo?” McFadden said. “Hello?”

“I’m here.” He ran his hands through his hair. He looked down at his pants. A new spot of urine. He smelled weird all of a sudden. “I can’t even figure out what that means.” Another gust moved through him, a windy metallic shiver. “What does that mean?”

“It means that come tomorrow they comb your dad’s house for real, and if they find anything …”

Darlo felt like he was being lifted up right there in his shoes. Those cops would find signs of a regular Inquisition chamber down there in the catacombs.

“But what about the money, Bob?
My
money.”

One more lawyer sigh. Echoes of waves cresting in the Bering Sea.

“Nothing I can do right now, Darlo. I’m sorry. Borrow some from your bandmates.”

Darlo hung up. “Yeah, thanks, Bob!” he said. “Real swift.”

Creating a false image of one’s father wasn’t easy. To be the lone crusader for his good name, the defender of the faith, you had to drink the Kool-Aid and even lick the rim. All reason was against you. And look where it’s gotten me, Darlo thought. He imagined the house in Laurel Canyon, knew his dad was somewhere in there, maybe with one of those GPS bracelets around an ankle, celebrating the day he’d made the illustrious list of Those Who Have Been Indicted. This was, to David Cox, an honor.

“What bullshit,” Darlo said, and cracked his knuckles.

And how would his dad commemorate this exciting day, now that he could present himself as a bona fide outlaw? Probably by the pool, his no-longer-indestructible body taking in a fat line of prescription speed, eighteen-year-old nubiles at each corner of his vision like holes in a pool table, though the man wasn’t really much into sex anymore. He just wanted the pussy close, the ass in reach, the wet mouths at the ready to take orders. Viagra was all that kept him up anymore; he often went overboard with the drug, complaining to his son, whose erections were natural and never-ending, about the unique discomfort of the hard-on that wouldn’t die.

“Guess you can get too much of a good thing, eh, Kemo Sabe?” he’d said on a number of occasions. “Guess you can shoot the moon and hit the sun.”

Violence was his thing now. Daddy Cox would pay girls to get hit and tape their screams. Darlo had long wondered when one of these girls was going to turn her scream into a lawsuit. You could hear those screams through the bushes, down the street. How was it that no one had ever complained? How was it that no policemen had ever stopped by to chat?

He went and sat down at the bar next to Joey. The manager smoked a cigarette and looked through her bag for something she couldn’t find.

“That phone is a piece of fucking work,” he said, handing it over.

“Try carrying it around all day,” she said.

Darlo watched Joey wolf her bourbon and make smoke rings. The mohawk had grown too long in front, and blond hay fell into her eyes. Man, he wanted to kiss her. Nausea washed over him like a bore tide. Quicksand trapped him in place.

Darlo had gone through life thinking he was like any other guy. He was like Bobby, but cruder. He was like Bobby, but his dad was in porn. He was like Bobby, but no. He was of this, from this, destined to be this. He was not Bobby. Bobby’s parents were not people who taped the screams of desperate girls who fucked strangers for a living.

And then he snapped out of it. He rolled up on the shore of logistics and plans. Logistics and plans kept him safe.

Keep the band alive. Make the band your focus. Dad is lost.

He came up through the kelp. Logistics. And. Plans.

“Double bourbon,” he said, and lit a cigarette.

Joey quit looking for her lost item. “How’d it go?”

“For shit. I have to fucking call him back later. No funds.”

“I got your back.” Joey smiled, and then her nose wrinkled. “You really smell, babe.”

“I think I pissed on myself a little.” Darlo looked at his pants, shrugged. “You still haven’t told me what Hackney said.” He lit a cigarette. “Spill it.”

“Nothing to spill.”

Darlo didn’t believe her, but he could harbor only one worry at a time, and his father had taken that mooring.