And then he took in some water and started coughing.
Reality spread its billowing blanket and blocked out the sun. Darlo would kill them both if Adam didn’t get his attention, so he grabbed Darlo’s hair and pulled as hard as he could. The drummer cried out like a newborn, slipping off Adam’s shoulders.
“My fucking hair — Jesus!”
“Do you want to live?”
“Fucking prick, I don’t want to die!”
Then Darlo took in more water, coughed it up, thrashed about. Adam tried to get him on his back, navigating the tangle of arms, but then he started flailing too, because suddenly he was sure, absolutely sure, that the drummer had given up and was trying to drag them both down. The desire to live overtook the desire to help, and Adam threw Darlo off, completely certain that if there was one person not worth the trouble, it was Darlo, so fuck him, just fuck him, when he banged his arm into Crow Head. They had blundered their way right into the finish line, and they had tied.
Darlo’s shoulder slammed into Crow Head, which was riddled with guano. The steel drum god-echoes rose all around, wings turning white.
“I don’t want to die,” the drummer said. Blood ran down his tanned, sinewy shoulder. Adam smarted at how much Darlo looked like an illustration from a book of Greek myths. “What are we going to do?”
“Just shut up and hold on.”
“But what are we going to do?”
Amazing things happened when you were out of your watery depth and totally fucked. Amazing things showed up from the deeps of one’s personality.
“I can’t swim, Adam. I mean, I really can’t swim!”
“You swam here!”
“No, no, I didn’t!”
Adam grabbed Darlo’s nonbleeding shoulder, feeling the rock nick and cut at his legs. “Calm down.”
“I don’t want to die!”
Adam looked up at the craggy rock god. A mouth could be made out, full of jagged teeth. The sun hid behind the prehistoric silhouette.
Darlo was going on and on about how little he wanted to die, which was music to Adam’s wet ears. If Adam hadn’t been in mortal peril, he would have felt bad about thinking this way. What freedom there was in mortal peril!
He grabbed Darlo’s flailing arm. “It’s only fifty yards, Darlo.”
“No way. And fuck you for getting me out here!”
“Getting you out here?”
White piles of bird shit lay there, ruining everything for him.
“I never got you out here,” he said. “How can you blame this on me?”
And that was when the dirty French Jet-Skidiots showed up.
“French french fra-french, french ha ha ha!” They laughed. “French french!”
They wore green fluorescent bathing suits, and each had a shark’s tooth on wire hanging from his neck.
“French french french ha ha ha!”
They circled around, making a wake. Their voices battled for airspace with the steel drums.
“You guys are in need of some assistahnce?” one of them said. “You ’mericans lost yer way?”
“Help us!” Darlo yelled, as if they were a plume of smoke on a dark and stormy horizon. “Help us!”
“Ahh!” one said. “French french bleeding!”
Riding back on a Jet-Ski, his arms around a Frenchie’s skinny waist, Adam felt his relief soon turn to disgust. There was no evidence that anyone had saved anyone, and that galled him. He could never prove it. Darlo would probably say that he had saved Adam. Another good deed about to go punished.
Not to mention that the tide was coming in. He watched the crystal-clear water run over the sandbar in lengthening rivulets. His notebook slid in, tipping upward like the nose of a ship as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
Adam thought, I should have let him die.
But when they got back to shore, Darlo said nothing. He disappeared into town, and surfaced the next morning when he stumbled into the studio, smelling like he’d fucked half the island. Which he probably had. But he never said a thing.
Except one time, in the middle of the last American tour, when Darlo woke from a dream on I-5 near Grants Pass, woke up yelling so loudly that Bobby practically took the van into the guardrail.
“I don’t want to die!”
They looked at the drummer as if he’d just appeared from another world, covered in cross-dimensional jelly, stinking of the astral plane. He rubbed his eyes, made an expression of awe, and reached over to hit Adam on the shoulder.
“Hey,” he whispered. “Come here.”
Adam put down his copy of The Onion and moved close. “What?”
“I remember,” Darlo said, breath stinking of cigarettes. “I remember.”
Adam nodded, just barely.
“I was dreaming about it,” Darlo said. “But you weren’t there and I was fucked. The Crow Head laughed at me. I was a goner.”
“But you’re OK.”
Darlo nodded. “You saved my ass.”
“I did.”
“Thanks, man,” he said, and rolled over.
Now, in Vondelpark, Pizza Face was under Darlo and the drummer’s fists were covered in blood and he held that knife up in the air. Red jumped into Adam’s vision like in a two-color photograph, like a Barbara Kruger photo he had seen in a friend’s dorm room.
The skinhead gurgled under Darlo. The other one writhed on the ground, pulling at his face, trying to tear off the pepper spray, trying to get up, falling down, getting up, like an old blind man without his cane. Joey ran over and sprayed him again.
“Die, motherfucker!”
Darlo held the Magic Wand above his head for a moment. He seemed to be stretching, as if to imitate a guillotine.
Defying all gimpy-legged reality, Joey kicked the knife out of Darlo’s hand, yelling for him to run, pulling at him as he collapsed. The autumn breeze smelled like roasted chestnuts, and all the screaming was hail banging and bouncing upon a smooth roof.
Pizza Face rolled on the ground, and his friend bowed down, sort of crawled over, and wailed like a mother over the corpse of her son. Adam could not see the details, could not see Darlo’s anger mapped out and laid bare in all its momentum and leverage. The skinheads looked as if they had absorbed the force of an explosion.
Adam ran forward, grabbing his bag, ducking in the line of fire. He jumped on his bicycle, and for a second wondered if he should turn around and ride his rickety Dutch three-speed into the melee. But shock and disgust smothered the notion. What did he owe them? When had they ever cut him a break? Just for that moment, he wanted them to die. He wanted Joey and Darlo to vanish from the earth and had no interest in helping out, being loyal, lowering their chances for an early burial. As his brothers loved to say, Mea culpa, Caesar. Under the hail of shrieking, he rode away.
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, danc
e, 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 hav
e 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.”
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