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.
4
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.
“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?
5
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.
And who was that girl who had been giggling behind Bobby, giggling at everything the Mummy said? Fucking Bobby, always picking up the scraps at Darlo’s endless sex feast.
He sat down on a bench, cracked his back, wiped a piece of peanut butter out of his eye, and tried to meditate. Buddha taught that money and issues of the material world were just —
“Oh, fuck that,” he said.
The scene before him felt insidious: the well-dressed Dutch looking at him as if he were a gob of acidic spit burning a hole in their newly painted Euro bench; the pitter-patter of rain that fell from the Goth sky; the barking of Dutch pugs, running in circles with their crushed, buglike faces as their owners chattered, their posture excellent.
His mother had a pug named Rosie. Once a week you had to dig the slime out of the ridges in the dog’s face.
It is not good to blame others for the fault of one’s self, he thought. You can make of this day an opportunity, not for self-pity and misery but for taking stock. You could make this day a meditation on modesty, and be humble, like Buddha, and integrate your failings. You could practice Shamatha, and devote an hour to Vipashyana, and perfect the task of Vipassana.
You could also make of this day a time to reflect on how badly your quasi-religious bullshit has served you, and how perhaps just once it would be better to think like the people who surround you, think like Darlo or Joey or Bobby, with nothing but your own interest at stake.
He checked the time on the pink Swatch that Donna, his ex-girlfriend, had given him as a peace offering the day he left for tour.
“I wanted to let you know I cared,” she said. “This way we’ll always be together.”
He held a soft spot for her. She was the representation of all he had forsaken to take on this life, and though he thought she was hypocritical, judgmental, and wouldn’t take him in her mouth, he still associated her with cleanliness and clarity.
He breathed deep, trying to clean out his bad karma, just like that Seattle yoga instructor he’d fucked had told him to.
“I wish you lived here,” she’d said, pointing out the window at the snowy peaks of the Cascades. “You have such a clear aura. Totally clear. Even on coke!”
Though it was unpleasant to sit destitute in a foreign country while your ears ached from the percussive talents of some crazy foreign stepdad, it was less unpleasant than waking up next to girls like that yoga instructor, who looked at you after one night of amphetamine passion like they were going to turn you inside out, find everything they thought was wrong with you, and change it all while you were sleeping. And it was also less unpleasant than waking up in hotel rooms next to Bobby as the bass player scratched his hands and cried.
“Bobby,” he said, and made fists.
He tried to recall what day it was but could not. Being on tour took you out of civilization’s circadian rhythm. A weekend was meaningless, a respite from nothing at all. At first all of them thought this was the best possible proof that they’d escaped the clutches of society’s grinding ways, but as time went on they mused aloud that it would be nice to have a part of the week to have something to look forward to. Their lives were suspended, floating, and they were never sure which direction they should be headed in, borne by currents that had long ago turned into a churning rock-and-roll riptide.
“Friday,” he said. “It must be Friday.”
He exited onto the street. Before him lay a Starbucks inside an old mansion. Through the windows, he watched hot Barista-Frau serve more superswank Dutchies, who then repaired to tables to read their crisp, perfectly creased newspapers, not a bit of ink on their hands. Shane was in the habit of pretending he knew something about art — why should Adam have all the fun? — and he tried to compare the scene to that of a famous painter, as if someone were there waiting for him to prove he was smart. He scratched at some peanut butter itching his ear.
“Edward Hooper?” he said. “Is that his name?”
Some church bells rang, off in the clouds, bringing to mind his decision to give most of his advance — which, after everyone got his cut and his taxes approximated, was a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars — to the New Fundamentalist Baptist Church of Anaheim.
“Sounds like a bank,” Bobby had said. “Why would you do that?”
The two had been sitting on the Venice pier, eating hot dogs. They were leaving the next day for their first tour, and Shane felt compelled to tell someone about his decision, to, yes, fine, show what a selfless seeker he was. He would rather have told Adam, but here he was with Bobby, and he couldn’t hold it in.
“I want to give back,” the singer said. “The church has provided me with the moral backbone I’ll need to make it through this journey with my integrity intact. I can’t even imagine the temptations we’ll find.”
“I can,” Bobby said, and smiled. “Can I ever.” The bass player chewed thoughtfully on his hot dog. “I think that’s admirable, really,” he said. “But it sounds like guilt money to me — like you’re just trying to make yourself feel better about what you’re doing.”
“Well, it’s not,” Shane sa
id, indignant. “I am honoring His works by tithing. Tithing is a practice by which the —”
“You know I’m an atheist, right? Like, I have no idea what you’re talking about and I don’t care.” Bobby lit a cigarette and shook his hands, which at the time showed only traces of eczema. “I don’t know, man. Giving all your money to some fascist church sounds pretty stupid to me. One day you’ll really regret it.”
That day, at the dawn of the Blood Orphans anti-empire, Shane’s bank balance showed twenty thousand dollars. This was spending money; the band received a per diem check once a month, a direct deposit in the amount of four hundred and fifty dollars, which broke down to fifteen dollars a day. The balance, fifteen grand, was the part of his advance he hadn’t tithed.
Now, seventeen months later, all of his remaining money, all two hundred tax-free euros, lay, most probably, in a gutter. The rest of it sat in a vault beneath his childhood house of worship in Anaheim.
Squatting against a Dutch wall, his stomach growling and his wallet empty, he thought his decision to give back was the dumbest thing he could have done.
“Pride comes before a fall,” he said, and went into the Starbucks.
How strange it was to be looked upon as slime. So much of his life had been spent pronouncing upon the failings of others. One does not see one’s own vanity until groveling in personal decay. He thought of the Buddha before he became transfigured, a prince dressed in the finest silk, awaiting his enlightenment, and tried to meditate while standing in line, now a pauper, now one of the outcasts asking for alms.
I am a beggar, Shane thought, free of material want. I am sweetness and light, joy and radiance. He imagined chirping birds perched on his shoulders. The beggar approached the barista.
“Hello,” he said in the most joyous voice he could. “Hello. I come to ask for coffee. I come … to ask … for coffee.”
The girl — short, blond, and looking as if she’d just jumped out of an ad for Dutch waffles — did not regard him as a fallen prince receiving enlightenment. A beat-up scarab, maybe. A frayed Teutonic leaf, perhaps. A peanut-butter-stinking American poser with matted albino stubs for hair, most likely.
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