Rock Bottom (29 page)

“Nama rama ho-ho ding-dong!” Bobby laughed. “Nama navaho yodel-ay-hee-who!”

A knock at the bathroom door. He snapped the phone shut. Dave the drummer came shuffling in. “Sorry, dude,” he said, and his groupie followed behind him for blowjob numero duh.

Shane stumbled back out to Gomorrah Central. Tennessee writ large sat there, gorging on platters of fried chicken and french fries. The smell of grease made Shane’s stomach hiccup, but he kept it together, sat down, and opened a Coca-Cola.

Ron motioned to the food. “You OK, PB and J?”

Shane nodded.

“Damn, this is good chicken!” another one said. “Some fine, fine music!”

Chicken grease sprayed around as their teeth ripped and tore. It was a slaughterhouse in here.

Shane sipped his Coke and picked up an acoustic guitar, a Gibson Hummingbird Custom, list price four thousand American, a six-string signing bonus. Out of tune, it still sounded like the ghost of Segovia.

“Play something, baby,” one of the girls said, pulling on a wing. “What band did you say you were in?”

Shane took out the CD and dropped it on the table. “Blood Orphans.”

They stopped with their chewing and ripping and stared at him.

“
No,
” said the girl who’d been Ron’s Mile High prop, and licked her fingers. “Didn’t you guys, like, break up?”

“No.”

“I thought you broke up,” Ron said. “I swear I read it in
Spin.
”

“I read it in
Magnet,
” the smooth guitar player said.

“I read it in
Rolling Stone,
” said Dave the drummer, emerging from the bathroom and zipping up his pants. “I saw it on MTV.”

“I’m the singer,” Shane said. “I’m Shane Warner, and I can promise you we’re still together.”

“You’re the preacher’s kid!” said one of the girls, a blonde with glitter on her eyelids who hadn’t yet said a thing, who’d just giggled her way through the last half-hour. “I read about you on Pitchfork. You’re the Christian!”

“Uh …”

“Yeah, there’s four of you, right? There’s a preacher’s kid, that’s you, there’s the guy whose parents are in porn … and who are the two other guys?”

“Adam and Bobby. I’m not a preacher’s kid.”

“Far out!” She raised her chicken leg, waved it like a judge with a gavel. “Right on!”

Ron started dancing around with the tops of the silver food trays, clanging them together lightly, but in Shane’s estimation he’d become possessed by Danika’s stepdad. His ears rose to the bait and started pulsing.

“You guys are
infamous!
” Ron said, dancing around, forming a conga line with four of the girls. “In-fa-mous pricks, hey!”

“It’s just Darlo,” Shane said. “Darlo’s the prick.”

“Oh yeah, now I remember!” said Dave’s blowjob queen. “You threw pies at some Warners execs. I read about that in
Rolling Stone.
”

Shane wondered why every time he met people who knew about the band, they dredged up yet another bad memory.

“Pies,” Ron said. “What was that all about?”

The idea was to have a record release party in the grand old tradition of the sixties and seventies, when such things were a cultural event. So they had arranged, a week after that horrible trip down Fifth Avenue in the back of a flatbed, to get dressed up like dudes out of a circus and have a medieval feast, like the Rolling Stones did for the release of
Beggars Banquet.

They rented out Tavern on the Green. All the Warners execs came, because Blood Orphans was going to be the money truck and this was a way to grease the wheels, another fully recoupable sendoff the suits would make back before the band saw a penny of royalties. They hired some conceptual artist who had thrown theme parties for Aerosmith and Sting, turned the Tavern into a silk-and-satin Renaissance Fair, filled it with news media from seven countries. The gluttony angle was a lock on pages in entertainment sections all over the Western world. Even the Norwegians sent over one of their best tall thin blond men to watch from the back.

The band sat on a dais against the wall. On the dais lay a pig with an apple stuffed in its mouth, various game laid out in bounty, and cornucopias to the max, just like in Merry Olde England. They looked like sixteenth-century lords, ripped at turkey legs, and smiled for the camera.

“I’m gonna get drunk,” Darlo had said into Shane’s ear. “And then you and I are going to double-team a few of these college journalists.”

Shane switched seats with Adam.

After much merrymaking, the pies came out. A hundred cream pies. A regular pyramid o’ pies, because that’s the way the Stones had done it.

“What are those for?” someone yelled out.

“For throwing,” Bobby said, and bashed one into Darlo’s ear.

“Do that again!” a photographer yelled.

“I have a better idea!” Darlo said, and chucked one at the crowd.

Joey, who wore a Comme des Garçons dress that made her look like a slut Cinderella, threw pies like Nolan-fucking-Ryan. The crowd of international correspondents ducked, but it was no use. They strafed the place with whipped cream and sugar. Enough people became involved that the scene degenerated into crust-and-cream anarchy, covering the band in pie-errata, ruining their expensive medieval costume clothes. To top it off, Darlo pie-pounded the president of the Warner Music Group square in the face.

“And the guy’s face bled, right?” Ron said, strumming on another guitar. “I read about that in
Blender.
I was working in the Tower on Sunset and I showed that to everyone. Oh shit, it was a fucking mess!”

“Darlo’s always out of control,” Shane said.

“Every time we bring up an idea like that,” Dave the drummer said, “they mention you guys. You made it hard for the rest of us to have any fun. Thanks for making our lives so damn boring.”

Dave wasn’t using that pathetic drummer tone anymore. A blowjob an hour put some weight into a guy’s voice.

“Oh, yeah, you have it so tough!” said his girlfriend du jour. “My pretty mouth is just a living hell.”

“No, it’s heaven,” Dave said, getting down on his knees. “Heavenly!”

But look at me, Shane thought, moving in his clothes like moldy meat in between stale bread.
Look at what happened to me.

The broken table was a bummer, so they moved to some white couches near the window. They smoked and fiddled with guitars.

Shane dozed off and dreamed that he was running from disasters. Sometimes the disasters could not be escaped. A man beat on him in the alleyway of a major American city. There were cataclysms. He sank into a hole during an earthquake. Hands reached up to him, covered in sewage.

He sat up straight. His jeans felt oily on his legs.

“I’m like Job,” Shane blurted out. “That’s the thing.”

They passed a pipe around. Ron, who seemed to be the guitar player, played “Creep.” Everyone sighed and joined in.

“I want a perfect body,” they sang, “I want a perfect soul.”

They were half-watching a large TV embedded in the wall. The skunky stink of weed floated on a stench of fried food.

Ron stopped playing and turned to him, hazy-eyed. He wagged his finger as if it moved through mayonnaise. “You sound like my dad, man.
Job?
What do you mean you’re like Job? You’re nothing like Job.”

Shane shrugged. “Feel like I am. God has brought travails upon my head.”

“Travails? Stoned Peanut Butter. Old stony Peanut Butter Bob.”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Well, stop smelling like a can of old Skippy.”

“It was Danika’s fault. Dan-ee-ka.”

Shane had his hands in the air, imagining them covered in eczema. Ron grabbed at them.

“Stop with that, dude,” he said. “It’s freaking me out.”

Shane put his hands down. When he did, Darlo’s dad’s face stared at him from the television.

It took him a few seconds to get it. An MTV news exclusive. A man in a three-piece suit led away in handcuffs. A shot of the Cox estate. Mug shots of two men with thick necks and slicked-back hair.

“Fucking no fucking way.”

He grabbed the remote and turned the volume up.

“… in a scheme that involves a regular checklist of white-collar crime — money laundering, racketeering, and falsification of documents to the SEC. Cox, whose name is synonymous with a type of adult entertainment known as extreme porn, has been under surveillance by the district attorney’s office for over six months.”

Cut to a man in a suit at a lectern emblazoned with the DA’s coat of arms. Skinny, bald, like Ed Harris.

“Mr. Cox has been arrested on charges stemming from an investigation of convicted West Coast drug lord Joel Savage, who in the past helped with the financing of some of Mr. Cox’s ventures. One of them, a store called Grimly Fiendish, was, we believe, the key business through which Mr. Cox and his various confrères structured their fraudulence.”

“Confrères,” Ron said. “I like it.”

“Mr. Cox,” the narrator continued, “has a long history of dancing near the edge of the criminal underworld. In 1981 he was associated with the victims of a gangland-style killing in Laurel Canyon, known as the Wonderland murders.”

“Shit,” a groupie said, holding her smoke. “That’s fucked up.”

“That’s my drummer’s dad,” Shane said. “That’s Darlo’s fucking father.”

Shane turned up the volume. A picture of Cox swirled toward the screen. He was at a party, with a table full of strippers. Raised glasses hid parts of their faces.

“Mr. Cox’s name has been under a cloud since the 1997 overdose of Alice Jarvis, an eighteen-year-old-woman, at his mansion in the Hollywood Hills. Ms. Jarvis, who spent two weeks in a coma, claimed that Cox had tried to kill her because she had overheard discussions between him and several men regarding their various schemes. Cox claimed that she was a hanger-on, a party girl who just happened to overdose in his house.”

Grainy footage of Cox framed against surf and palm trees. Winds galed but didn’t do a thing to his perma-glued, too-black pompadour. “She was,” he said, “a very unfortunate girl. I wish her the best. But I maybe met her once, twice, before I found her lying on my bathroom floor.”

“Slimy,” one of the girls said. “El Creep-o.”

Shane looked out the window. Darlo must know. Against all judgment, sympathy rose in him.

“Mr. Cox is also under investigation regarding allegations that he was part of a sex-slave ring. A woman named Daniella Spencer —”

Ron clicked off the TV. “Bad vibes,” he said, licking his fingers for chicken grease. “Lame, huh? That sucks for your drummer.”

“Fuck him,” Shane said. “He’s a sodomy-obsessed misogynist with a mean streak a mile wide.”

“Sodomy?” one of the girls said. “What’s his number?”

It really signaled the end, didn’t it? The father, in his wretched but fiery unstoppable glory, was the coal that stoked the son’s engine. With the old fuck busted, the drummer’s flame would surely peter out, flicker, and die.

As went Darlo, so went Blood Orphans. It was a hated, nonnegotiable law, an immutable covenant of their lives.

Despair grew in Shane. Despair made fireworks in his stomach, made the red meat and whiskey grind the hydrochloric gears.

“Dude, play us some Blood Orphans,” Ron said, handing Shane that zillion-dollar guitar and patting him on the shoulder. “That’ll make you feel better.”

He felt a house of suffering upon his seeker’s spirit. His vision quest? Bullshit. Your journey to oneness with God, Buddha, whatever? A joke. Your absolute belief that life has meaning, that struggles are part of His plan, that setbacks are signs of Providence not yet earned? A lie.

“Sing … us a song,” Ron sang. “A song to keep … us warm … ”

“Love that one,” one of the girls said, shivering in her buckskin and taking another hit off a joint. “Heartbreaking.”

The truth was, Shane barely knew any chords. He never played the guitar onstage; Darlo and Joey wouldn’t allow it.

“No way are you going to be a dilettante guitar player,” they’d said, for their voices often blended together, Darlo low, Joey high, making a harmony of nemesis. “You stand there and rock out with your cock out. None of that now-I’m-a-sensitive-guy-with-the-guitar shit.”

He ran his hands up the neck. The strings were sharp.

“You just sing,” Darlo-Joey said. “You leave the guitar playing to Adam. Fucking Bono shit. Does Steven Tyler strap on a guitar? I think not!”

Another way they’d kept him down.

“So play something, PB and J,” Ron said.

Shane shook his head. “All our songs are disgusting.”

“True,” Dave said. “I have the record.”

Shane did a double-take. “You have
Rocket Heart?
”

“Sure.”

“You bought it?”

“Yeah.”

“No one gave you a review copy? Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

A minor miracle.

“Then you name a song,” Shane said.

Everyone looked at Dave. He appeared to enjoy the attention, the lowly drummer. He tapped his finger on his chin for an extra second.

“ ‘Hella-Prosthetica,’ ” he said.

One of the girls made a face of wondering. “Nice name,” she said. “What the hell’s that about?”

In answer, Shane began to strum. The room grew warm under his dulcet tones. Rhythm was a little hard to come by, no, it was a lot hard to come by, but he tried to channel the higher powers, the Gautama and the Jesus and the spirit of the seeker. These ethereal guidance counselors were the only things keeping him from utter spiritual truancy, from failing out of God School for good. Darlo’s lyrics fought Shane, but Shane pushed the words to a transcendence of meaning, finding their inner glory:

Once upon a time I knew a girl who liked to beg.

That was tough: she had no legs.

She was a trooper, I never made her ask twice.

Sex with amputees is really quite nice.

Just like every other time they had played the song, the audience froze a little. Even the Tennessee rock-and-roll idiots were caught in the crossfire of irony and bad taste. This little tune redefined audience reticence.

Are you familiar with a position called The Stump?

It’s just about the best way to pump, pump, pump.