“No. We’re on Warner Brothers. We were the next big thing once.”
“Oh, really?” She lit another cigarette. “You sure?”
“Yeah. We used to be the shit.”
She French-inhaled. “Sure. I totally believe you.”
But it was true. Back in the beginning, Blood Orphans had roamed in fields of goodwill, picked apples from the tree of rock-and-roll goodness, and rolled in the green grass of collective bump-and-grind dreams. Bobby had a weakness for the medieval metaphor, and so he had a fixed image of Blood Orphans as pied pipers at the gates of dawn, wearing bells and vibrant-colored patchwork clothes, rousing up the people of all the good villages to follow them to a place of cultural harmonic convergence. It had been amazing. Elysian, even.
Elysian was one of his favorite words. One time Shane had tried to lecture him on the Elysian nature of Tantric Buddhism, and he had flicked a lit cigarette at the singer’s face.
“My word, you prick,” he said. “Find your own fucking word.”
And truthfully, getting their wings had been effortless. Having played the ironic/not ironic card masterfully — Adam’s heavy riffs, Darlo’s parody lyrics, Bobby’s stupid-basic bass parts, and Shane’s blond-sylph caterwaul, fused into a package by Joey’s fast-talking impressariette jive — the A&R hordes arrived in a tizzy. Within five shows, representatives from all the major labels stormed the barricades of Silver Lake in a blazing idiot wind. One of these walking expense accounts claimed that Blood Orphans was the missing link between Aerosmith, Korn, and the Strokes. Another described them as a nucleus around which a completely new musical style could be constructed. Yet another said that in his twenty years of A&R, he’d seen three acts that blew his mind: Nirvana, Jane’s Addiction, and Blood Orphans.
You could always tell a normal human being from A&R. They had an extra chromosome of utter insincerity, a covalent ion of free-floating bullshit, making them unlinkable to other, more stable molecular structures. This insincerity most often manifested itself in their appearance — always too dressed up, or not dressed up enough, or wearing a chain of precious metal around their neck, or sporting an extreme version of a hairstyle that went out of fashion six years ago. No one but A&R wore a white suit to a show. No one but A&R would go on and on about how great it was to drink top-shelf vodka. And no one but A&R, except for Darlo, would speak of Caribbean vacations, the crystal blue water, so perfect for snorkeling, the deep-sea fishing trips. Caught a swordfish! It was sweet!
And so the A&R hurricane arrived, in a flurry of free dinners, free whiskey, free lap dances. No independent labels needed to apply; Joey made that clear to all.
“Blood Orphans doesn’t have the bandwidth for small fry,” she’d declared. “We want planetary dominion and total wealth accumulation. We want France and Greece and Brazil. We want it all. Street cred, you ask? Does it pay my bills? Does it help my stock portfolio? Fuck the little panty-waisted Buddy-Holly-glasses-and-V-neck-sweater-wearing emo shitheads! Zeppelin wasn’t indie. Sabbath wasn’t indie. Fuck the fifty-fifty split after cost. I want distribution in motherfucking Nowhere, Idaho. I want to see our faces in fucking Bulgaria, Romania, all the eastern bloc countries that never made it to the twenty-first century. Blood Orphans isn’t looking to be the house band of white ghetto cool. We want to rock Wembley! Rock the Coliseum in Rome! Rock the LA Forum! Twee, integrity-bound motherfuckers, look upon me and despair!”
The band resembled a new Maserati coming off the line, souped up and tricked out, mad, bad, and nationwide. But beneath the slick exterior, Blood Orphans was Pinto through and through. Rear-end them the wrong way and they’d explode all over the big rock interstate.
Luckily, Warner Bros. saw no need to take them for a test drive.
Bobby longed for those early days, now that the downward spiral was something he looked up to see.
“Yes,” Sarah said as they walked down Kalverstraat, a boulevard of tourists and consumer goods. “A very sad story. But are you sure you’re not totally full of shit?”
“Very sure,” Bobby said. “If you think I’m so full of shit, maybe you ought to leave me to my misery.”
She made a contemplative expression. “I was going to spend the day studying, but that can wait. This is more fun. You are more fun.”
“That’s funny,” Bobby said. “I was just stepping out to get a coffee before I killed myself. But this is more fun.”
His hands itched so badly he wanted to bite them off. He had actually bitten at his hands before, like a rodent pinned in a trap; Shane had caught him doing so in the bathroom of the Bowery Ballroom, before they played the thousand-capacity venue to about fifty hecklers. It was like getting caught masturbating.
Please bite me, his hands said. Bite me now. But if he did, he would lose his hot new Dutch friend.
“It looks like you stuck your hands in a furnace,” she said.
“They’ve been like this for months,” he said. “I don’t know how to turn the corner.”
She gingerly took them, examining. “We should get you to my doctor,” she said. “I wonder if we can get you some painkillers.”
“Painkillers sound lovely.”
Even at the darkest moment of this two-year experience, he found that being in a touring rock-and-roll band afforded special treatment from the large chunk of the Western world known as Females Under Thirty. He had small but authentic powers; he was a traveling spirit, a little bit holy, a metaphor for adventure. Being a rock musician was one of the last good ways to catch a break.
“Hey, rock star,” she’d said, and here she was, Florence fucking Nightingale with a perky rack, vintage clothes, and fire-red hair. She stroked his hands like a fortune-teller.
“It’s your mind acting up on your body,” she said. “My friend picked out his hair from stress for a long time.”
“I feel like a cripple,” he said, and looked into her eyes. “It completely changes your life. There are all kinds of everyday things I cannot do.”
She looked over his hands with a clinical expression. “Your band must be so worried about you.”
He twiddled his fingers in the air. “Are you kidding?” he said. “They call me the Mummy.”
She laughed, then covered her mouth to try to be polite, which was the best response he could hope for. So he laughed along with her, milked the wounded monster card. Mee a funny monsterr. Mee have feelings too. People they passed tried and failed to keep their eyes off the deformed American fool.
“What was the name of your band again?”
“Blood Orphans.”
“I’m not sure if I’ve heard of you. What was the name of the record?”
“Rocket Heart.”
She lit a cigarette and winked. “If we went to a record store, then I would know if you are lying. You could just be trying to get with me, huh?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “I have a rotten imagination. I’m no good with girls. Not smooth at all.”
“But you’re cute.” She took a drag. “Still, I want to see your record. See if you’re legit, you know?”
“We won’t find it,” he said. “The record’s as rare as a three-dollar bill.”
She giggled, undaunted. And he wasn’t cute, he knew that. He looked like a Baldwin brother, but not Alec. Billy, maybe, but minus the raffish charm.
“Amsterdam’s big record store is this way,” she said, her tight little plaid-covered Dutch ass leading the way. “Let’s settle this, huh?”
In every city, it was as if Warners had erased the memory of Blood Orphans from history. The last time he’d seen Rocket Heart in a record shop was in Gainesville, back in August, and even then it was an accident. Adam found three copies hidden in the torch song section, behind The Best of Billie Holiday. Darlo had demanded an explanation, loudly enough to get himself forcibly removed by a girl wearing a Bettie Page haircut and a Misfits T-shirt. “I heard about you and your stupid band!” she screamed. “Racists! Disgusting!” Darlo, who normally
had a retort for every occasion, scurried backward, a crab swallowed by the rising tide of public opinion.
On Kalverstraat, armies of young Dutchies bearing colorful scarves zoomed by on rickety bicycles, the kind Bobby’s old hippie grandmother rode down the streets of Venice Beach. These bikes shouldn’t have worked at all, but they had a mysterious Dutch efficiency. Everything worked better here. Despite the congestion, the cyclists moved like water rolling through perfectly oiled urban cogs.
“My stepdad is a musician,” Sarah said. She wore chunky heels and still barely cleared five feet. “He plays the ukulele and the guitar. Folk music mainly. I think that he wanted to be a professional musician too, go live in a van, screw girls he barely knew.”
“We never do that,” he said. “That’s a myth. It moves product.”
“Yeah, right. Now he’s a house builder with an anger management problem. He has a wine cellar and loves to ski. I wouldn’t describe him as an unhappy guy. But when I play the Sex Pistols or the Clash in the car, it’s like he goes into another world. I wonder if meeting you would break his heart a little.”
“He has no idea what he didn’t miss,” Bobby said. “I promise you.”
His cell phone rang; the number had no ID. Maybe Darlo had died a violent death, his face slashed, yes, why not, like a Levolor blind, and the morgue needed Bobby to ID the body. That would be an honor well earned.
Dream on.
“Hello?”
“It’s Shane. Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m here. What do you want, Siddhartha?”
“Oh, Bobby, thank God.”
“What is it?”
Static overcame the line, then faded off.
“I need money,” Shane said. “My money was stolen from my wallet.”
“What makes you think I have any?”
“Because you always do,” Shane said. “Come on, man, just help me.”
It was true that Bobby had plenty of money. Bobby actually lived on his per diems. But hearing Shane’s voice, a little tinny and gravelly, leached all the generosity right out of him.
While listening to Shane recount his shitty morning, Bobby exchanged a glance with Sarah that transmitted all kinds of undeserved affection. He had never felt more fortunate than Shane, so it was so very satisfying to hear the little Christian Buddhist whatever-the-fuck-he-was whine away from the bottom of life’s well while Bobby hung out with his new Dutch fox.
“On top of that,” Shane said, “my hair’s covered in peanut butter.”
“Peanut butter, huh?” Bobby said. “Kinky.”
“Are you going to help me or what?”
“Hmm,” he said. “Actually, no.”
Shane huffed. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I hate you.”
“It’s an emergency.”
“Talk to God about it.”
“Fuck you, Bobby,” he said. “Fuck you and your fucking —”
Bobby hung up, satisfied. Contributing to Shane’s despair cast a dazzling ray over his already bright mood.
“Your bandmate?” Sarah asked.
“That’s right. The singer. Piece of shit.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” she said. “Really.”
“I have my reasons,” he said, and cracked a rotting knuckle.
They’d come upon the superstore, which was called Fame.
“This is silly,” he said, stepping back. “We’re not going to find the record.”
She raised her eyebrows. “You’re not making all of this up, are you?”
“Of course not.”
She took his hand. “Let’s go in. My curiosity is killing me.”
The bass player felt the familiar hum of humiliation coming on. Aerosmith’s new record, Rockin’ the Joint, was prominently displayed, and Franz Ferdinand blasted through the speakers, their ferocious, angular, and undeniably pro stomp coming down on Bobby to call bullshit on his very soul.
“Oh, I love this song!” Sarah said, and shook her plaid ass.
Bobby had been in this situation before, experienced the awfulness of not being able to find the record in a megastore while trying to impress a girl, saw the way he shrank in said girl’s eyes when the store clerk tried not to laugh when she said that he was in Blood Orphans, and come on, there must be one copy of the record here! No? Not one? Not one?
And then Bobby’s heart skipped a beat. In a corner, in the farthest shadowy reaches of the pop/rock section, he saw his face.
“Oh my God!” Sarah said. “Look at that!”
Bobby’s mouth dropped wide open, gaped at the wall display. An oversized poster of their album cover. The four faces of Blood Orphans gazing up from some primeval darkness, looking tough, righteous, and blissfully unaware of the misery ahead.
They were arranged like a compass. Darlo was north, Adam was west, Shane was east, and Bobby was dead south.
Below them, in Old English font, Blood Orphans, and below that, Rocket Heart, and below that, June 23. Down at the edge, someone had tagged a small Post-it note and scrawled Star Club November 24–25.
Four faces in the shadows, come from mighty Los Angeles to completely fucking fool themselves.
Sarah grabbed his arm and jumped up and down. “Holy shit!” she said. “That’s totally you!”
“How?” he said through the fog of war. “What?”
A clerk stopped, looked at the picture, looked at him, pushed his lower lip out, tapped his clipboard. “You?” he said while blasts of Scottish melody and syncopation thundered out of the speakers. “You?”
“Him!” Sarah said, and pulled Bobby close to the poster. “Wow!”
Bobby stared at himself and barely recognized the kid he saw. He looked healthy and free, happy and cocksure.
“I totally thought you were lying,” she said. “I don’t believe it!”
As he stood there with this adorable girl suddenly holding on to his arm with both hands, a certainty about the finalities of time settled and took hold. The boy in the picture, his head pushed defiantly upward, could never have imagined anything that Bobby felt here, without the use of his opposable thumbs and two weeks before his twenty-seventh birthday. The picture was a relic from a lost place to which he would never return, from that Elysian time that had been rubbed out of his memory, from the endless summer, from the perpetual kiss of the warmth of the sun, from the frolic in the lush fields of future fame. He knew that he was now, at this moment, officially in the twilight of his youth.
2
DARLO’S MOTHER, ANN ATCHISON, had helped found Dirty Darling and had performed in many of the company’s early films. She shouldn’t have been one of the big stars because she would only fuck girls on camera, but that didn’t matter, because she looked like she should have been emblazoned across the Mexican flag: pneumatic tits and ass, mocha skin, a smile that could start a revolution, and black hair that rose over her head like storm clouds. She stood just over six feet tall. Her license plate was Inca Fire.
That didn’t last long. By the time Darlo was three, she had left her husband and young child, pulled a Linda Lovelace, gone Moral Majority. She remarried, to an oilman, got a J.D. from Texas Christian, and worked for a right-wing legal organization determined to stamp out everyone’s constitutionally guaranteed right to watch complete strangers rut on each other. She wrote to Darlo once a year, on his birthday, but aside from that, Ann Atchison was a stranger.
“Your mother’s the poster child for all the suppression and rage of American sexual life,” his dad would often say. “When I met her she was a lovely flower, the softest of sweet red petals, the most delicious glass of agua fresca I’d ever tasted. Now she makes Ed Meese look like a friend to the industry. But don’t let me stop you. You’re old enough to make your own decisions.”
Darlo saw his mother as the crazy woman who’d abandoned him, and considering that sex had always been waiting for him, a best friend and a comfort, any enemy of its free-flowing goodness was highly suspect. H
is dad seemed to live a happy polygamous life, rich and rejoicing 24/7, while she sat in the middle of west fucking Texas with the idiots who had tried to impeach President Clinton for doing only the most natural thing in the world: getting a little on the side. How could anyone turn down a hot piece of twenty-year-old intern ass?
But when Darlo was seventeen, his mother gave up being all God Squad, got divorced, and moved to Iowa to become a farmer. She met a man there, an Allstate agent. She mellowed and tried to make things right with her son.
“Your father has surrounded you with the trappings of Sodom,” she wrote in a letter. “You think that pleasure is holy. Pleasure as an end and a means. Pleasure at all costs. Satisfaction without accountability. That is the thrust of your father’s philosophy. It is a dead end: morally, spiritually, ethically. You must think about your actions in life. Do they serve a higher end? Do they enrich the lives of others beside yourself? Do they connect you with a higher purpose? Ask yourself. We would love to see you anytime here in Iowa. Fares are cheap. American has very good fares. Have you ever ridden a horse? We have many beautiful fillies in our stable. But ask yourself, seriously, Darlington, if —”
Darlo crushed the letter. His mother was a crank. But when he went to tear it up, his hands went still. Deep in that thick young-pirate head of his, he knew she was on to something. That awareness reached up through the tar of his testosterone.
She was on to something. He kept the letter.
She wrote again. “We were out in the meadow today, Darlo, and I was thinking of you. I was with John and Robert, your stepbrothers, and the wind was in our faces, cold and crisp and fresh, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great for you to be with us? I remember when you were a little boy, how we would go to the park in Encino and you’d love the bees and the birds, the flowers and the grass. You were a clear nature baby. You were Adam in his garden, and had His blessing. How I wished, I said to your stepbrothers, that you could be out here on the plain and see the real unfolding of nature, as opposed to the false idols that are daily painted upon your young eyes. Eyes so inured to kindness. Idols drawn across them, a jaded shroud.”
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