Rock Bottom (23 page)

21

OUTSIDE DR. GUTTFRIEND’S OFFICE
, Bobby decided that maybe Amsterdam wasn’t so bad after all. His hands would heal — someday — and until then he would be all right. Life wasn’t a complete bust, really; here was this girl, this sweet girl with hennaed hair, classy-tarty outfit, dusty blue eyes, and a full smile. She smoked Players and giggled at his every joke and acted as least as affectionate as the other girls with whom he had shared meaningful physical relationships.

Maybe the four of them would all be friends in a few years. They could come visit him here. They could come visit and see him and Sarah living in some four-hundred-year-old building full of modern Dutch architecture. He’d be, uh, working in a café, a bar, sure, bartending is a thing you can do anywhere, and his hands would be eczema-free. They’d have a bunch of fun Dutch friends with names like Bergitt and Hans, Saskia and Maarten, and each day would be a Euro blessing, kind and nonconfrontational.

He would play his bass in times of doubt. He would play his bass, normally hidden in the closet, when he began to forget how awful it had been. His fingers on the frets would bring Blood Orphans back to him, and he would shudder, put away childish things, and skip, dance, and hop toward a European thirty.

His phone rang, breaking off the daydream. Shane.

“Captain Vision Quest!” he yelled.

“Just wanted to thank you for leaving me to die.”

“Well, you and I both know that if you see the Buddha coming down the road, you’re supposed to kill him. But really, I’m just beside myself with shame.”

“I can tell. You are such a piece —”

“Hey, wait. Did you hear that?”

“What?”

“The sound of your bullshit hitting the karmic fan.”

Sarah gave him a freshly lit cigarette, which promptly fell out of his hands. She looked at him with angelic sympathy and rubbed his face. The touch filled him with a dose of sunny wrath.

Shane groaned. “Fucking screwed me over is what you did. Just like you always do.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Shane mumbled.

“Don’t mumble, bitch. How have I always let you down? Take your time. I’ll be here, wiggling my fake front tooth.” He paused. “I’m waiting, Darlo.”

“Don’t call me Darlo.” Shane snickered. Bicycles flew by, bearing young beauties in scarves of fine merino. “You’d love to be Darlo. It’s pathetic.”

“In remedial English that’s called a non sequitur.”

“Always the smartass,” Shane said. “Always so smart.”

“Compared to what, your stupid, faux-theological Orange County ass?”

Click.

Bobby inhaled. He smelled a field of blooming flowers.

“Who was that?” Sarah asked.

“The singer. Shane. The Jesus Buddhist dreadlocked bullshit artist.”

“I like Buddhism.”

“Me too. But Shane wouldn’t know Buddhism if it walked right up and split his duality in two.”

She giggled, and some of her rosy perfume boarded his nose.

He pointed at one of his front teeth. “See this tooth? The fucker knocked it out.”

“Why?”

“No reason,” he said, because telling the pretty girl who just may be your salvation that you destroyed someone’s childhood Bible was a bad strategy. “Maybe he got his dharma screwed up with his karma. Maybe because there were green M&Ms in the candy bowl. Maybe because he sold out his Christian faith to play in a sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll band.”

“You’re cute when you’re mad,” she said.

“Good,” he replied, “because I’m mad a lot.”

She threw her shoulder into him, all playful.

“I want to take you somewhere,” she said. “Do you like Van Gogh?”

Sarah was beginning to remind him of Phoebe, whom he’d dated at UCLA. She too dyed her hair with henna and had pixie features that clashed with big lips. Their relationship ended when she made it clear that she didn’t want to be with a rock musician. She didn’t want a guy who didn’t care about health insurance, who smoked a pack a day, who still thought Bruce Lee was a giant among men.

But then, not long after the band signed to Warners, she showed up at Spaceland for a sold-out show. Darlo snuck her in. He claimed he didn’t know she was Bobby’s ex until after they’d slept together.

“Just proves that women cannot be trusted,” the drummer said.

“I’ll kill you!” Bobby said, and took a swing at him.

That was two exes of his that Darlo had fucked. Unbelievable.

“If you wanted me to apologize, you can forget it now!” Darlo said after they’d been separated. “She’s the one you should punch.”

Actually, he thought, maybe Sarah didn’t look like Phoebe. Maybe he just needed a reason to do his thrice-daily self-torturing, in which Darlo vanquished him time and time again, in which the drummer stumbled his tall, dark, sex-addicted way into the pants of girls Bobby loved.

His hands throbbed, as if to say, We’d like our afternoon changing now.

Trying to reconcile this problem with Darlo, Bobby thought, was like being Bilbo Baggins in
The Hobbit,
in which Bilbo has to find a few measly arrows with which he has to pierce the hide of Smaug, the great dragon of Middle-earth. Smaug had one missing scale in his vast skin-armor, one stupid scale where Bilbo’s missile could find fatal purchase. The task was too large for him, but elves were depending upon him to make it so. The elves of his fearful, tour-sapped mind were counting upon him to slay the beast.

Somewhere back there, hiding behind the trees in tunics and slipper boots, Shane and Adam were waiting for him to make it right.

Darlo didn’t think about the band as a brotherhood. Shane didn’t think about anything but himself. Adam had his painting and his precious sensibility, being the fruity friend of all creatures large and small. Joey was racing her way from bindle to bindle, talking to herself about world dominance.

So he was alone in his groupiedom. He was the guy who still saw glitter on their name underneath all that resin. He was the chump happily lashed to the mast of the ghost ship.

For the others the band was a means, but to him it was an end. From the first fantastic practice in Darlo’s porn-set basement to tonight, when they would take the stage like prehistoric amphibians coming up from the slime, this clichéd, stuttering, rinky-dink epic was all he had ever wanted.

Damn it.

Now they were headed down Paulus Potterstraat. He let his phone ring and ring. Fuck Shane for even trying to get him out of this fantastic stroke of female luck.

They approached the Van Gogh Museum.

“He’s
my
rock and roll, man,” Sarah said. “He’s my Mick Jagger.”

“Van Gogh? Old one-ear, live-like-a-suicide Van Gogh?”

She hit his shoulder. “No joking!”

An ambulance drove by.

“Sorry,” he said, cracking his knuckles, popping open a bandage so it hung on his thumb like a flag at half-mast. “I can’t wait.”

“He’s a god to me,” she said, waving a finger in his face. “Be nice!”

Once Blood Orphans had met their gods. Once they had met Aerosmith backstage at the LA Forum. Well, they were supposed to, but then Aerosmith’s personal attaché showed up in their stead, showed up in some waiting area underneath the arena, near the locker rooms, and said that Steven and Joe and even Tom Hamilton had a personal emergency, and that they wouldn’t be able to make it.

“They are
so
fucking excited to go on tour with you,” the attaché said, and made a fist of rock-and-roll solidarity. “They wanted me to say that they love the record. They love how hungry you sound. So much hunger.”

“But where are they?” Darlo said. “How come they couldn’t make it?”

“Totally love the record,” said the attaché, who wore a black suit, a black shirt, and a black tie. “Totally psyched for you guys to get on the bus.”

“But where,” Darlo said, “are they?”

“Awesome record,” the attaché said, turning on his heel. “Awesome, and they can’t wait to meet you.”

Darlo had brought a T-shirt from the
Pump
tour — his first show — for signage. He chucked the old black rag at the skinny Aero-lackey, who disappeared down the tunnel.

“But
where
are they?” Darlo yelled, and his voice echoed off the steel walls.

A month later, after they had been dropped from the tour, Darlo took matters into his own hands.

“My dad used to be tight with Tyler,” he said. “Before Tyler went AA.”

They were driving to Tyler’s mansion, Bobby, Joey, and Darlo. The address and phone number of said mansion were in David Cox’s Rolodex.

“Tyler had the tastes,” Darlo said. “He loved the cocaine and the anus.” He shifted hard into fifth. “Male anus.”

“The cocaine, maybe,” Joey said. “But dude’s not
gay.
Damn he was hot before all the Botox.”

“There are things I can’t tell you, babe,” Darlo warned. “You wouldn’t believe the stories Dad told me.”

“Yeah,
stories,
” Bobby said. “Fiction. You probably don’t even have the right address.”

Chez Tyler was one of those Topanga Canyon jobs where the gate stood a mile away from the house, overgrown with flora to keep the freaks out, to daunt their personal star maps.

They rang the buzzer. Darlo made claims to someone in Tyler’s employ. “We’re old friends,” he said. “Darlo Cox. Son of David Cox.”

A few minutes later a patrol car arrived, featuring a cop who resembled Wilford Brimley if he had actually gone and eaten his oats.

“Get out of here,” the cop said.

“I’m a family friend,” Darlo said. “Steve knows me.”

Tyler must have had the cop on a sweet retainer. He went at Darlo like an old Green Beret, a real hand-to-hand-combat pro. Bobby thought he was going to remove his badge and break both the drummer’s arms.

“I said get the fuck out of here, punk, before I twist you into a pretzel and shove you into the back of that car.” He waved at the others like they were flies. “And take your faggot friends with you.”

Now Bobby shrugged.

“There was talk of meeting with Rod Stewart as well,” he told Sarah. “Stewart didn’t care about the racism thing, or the fact that we sucked. Stewart’s been making a career out of bad taste since he went disco.”

“He’s very gross,” Sarah replied. “He’s letchy. You shouldn’t mind that it didn’t work out.”

“I do mind, though,” he said. He had spent half of the eighth grade singing “Maggie May,” and one cute girl’s disdain wasn’t going to shake that strange love. “This was my big chance to meet rock stars, and now it’s done. Sounds ridiculous, right?”

She nodded. “Very ridiculous.”

They waited in line at the museum. Bobby had never liked Van Gogh. Sure,
Starry Night
was good, but people who disfigured themselves, no matter how brilliant, were six shades of stupid. He opened his mouth to share his opinion with Sarah, then realized that he’d formulated that opinion at twelve, while singing “Whole Lotta Love,” gorging on Doritos, and listening to Rush around the clock.

Soon he was going to need to change his Band-Aids.

“I come here at least once a month,” she said. “It’s a church for me.”

“That’s awesome,” he said, because he had lost his train of thought. Across the street, Darlo and Joey ran down the sidewalk.

“Totally awe … some,” he said. “What the fuck?”

It was them all right. Joey hobbled crazily, making some pretty amazing time, kind of pulling Darlo forward. And was that blood on their hands?

“What’s wrong?” Sarah asked. “Bobby?”

Amazing how the simplest image can grow monumental, sum up everything. Amazing how you can just float in oily understanding.

His drummer and his manager, running down a leaf-blown, five-hundred-year-old street, their hands covered in blood. And he, bearing witness.

What were the chances?

“Bobby?” she said again.

A chill ran through him. A chill and a splash of melancholy, curdling on contact, like milk when it falls into a cup of tea with lemon.

You look familiar. Are you in a band?

He’d had a feeling like this the day they signed to Warners. No blood was involved — in retrospect it was a pound of flesh — but he’d had that sense of complete emotional summation. The drummer and the manager sprinted from an invisible terror, and he wanted to sprint with them; whatever lay ahead, he wanted to be part of it. Their terrors were his terrors. He felt left out of a big secret; the solution lay in falling in line. But the gravity of the female fantasia kept him still.

“Hey.” She shook his jacket. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah, sorry.” They locked eyes. “I don’t … Forget it.”

“You sure?”

If he was going to miss out on being where the real action was, then he sure as shit was going to throw caution. He kissed her, and she leaned in, whispering his name in her cute little accent.
Buuby. Buuby.

So far, so good. But then under the museum’s pleasant lights, Bobby went numb. Under normal circumstances, numb would have been nice, giving his hands a break, cutting out the itchiness, the discomfort, the damp grossitude of flesh taking its time to spume and rot. But this wasn’t nice. He had just witnessed his drummer and his manager running down the street in dreamtime. Their hands were bloodied, which in said dreamtime was incontrovertible proof of a higher symbolism. Not that Bobby understood the image; but nonetheless he was possessed by it, and suddenly unsure of the, you know, dude, the
reality
of things. When does the myopic vacuum of living the touring life change one’s perspective into unreliability? When do you cease to trust what you see?

“Isn’t this lovely?” Sarah asked. They stood in front of a painting called
The Potato Eaters.
Bobby did not think it was lovely. At that moment, a new job as Pete Townshend’s valet would not have been lovely.

“Yeah,” he said, and couldn’t feel his neck connecting head to torso. “Sure.”

“What I love about it,” she said, leaning against him, “is the way that the people seem to be decaying right in front of us. The toll of their unhappy lives is right there on their faces.”

“Totally,” he said.

“And the colors too,” she continued, pointing. “The tones are so … how do you say it in English?
Mournful.
It looks like a family planning a funeral.”