Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  He leaned against the wall. The showerhead, high above him like the nourisher of all things, rained down. Water dripped from his lips.

  “But where are You? You are nowhere. Show Your face to me.”

  The pain delivered him no knowledge. Nothing from the wellspring but an empty echo of pitter-patter covering his tears. His ears settled back into a steady, numbing thump, and he looked up to the Teledyne altar. Water poured down like silver.

  “Show Your face to me!”

  He exited from the stall and donned a plush terrycloth robe that fell down to his ankles. But luxury, even this slight, went against his unshakeably shitty mood; within a minute he was out of the robe and back into his nasty clothes, which, sad smells and all, felt like part of his body, felt like armor. Certain things were indispensable in the seeker’s quest, but terrycloth was not one of them.

  He tuned the TV to VH1 Europe, broke the seal on the wet bar, and mixed a bourbon and water. Ordered a cheeseburger from room service, because veganism suddenly seemed like a dumb thing when you had free meat at the snap of your fingers. Felt a hot hum in his crotch and marveled at the everpresence of sin in his heart.

  Watching twilit Amsterdam from the window, he was filled with serenity as he used to be in church, when he would turn to his left and see his whole family there, dressed and buffed: his sister, Jane, his brother, Tom, both of them still in high school and showing little interest in rock and roll, or any form of self-expression; his mother, Catherine, happily born, bred, and set to die in Orange County; and his dad, the old engineer, whose intellectual curiosity was as narrow as Paris Hilton’s waistline. Shane stared down the pew and they looked at him, waiting for a cue.

  “I should meditate,” he said. “I should be thankful.”

  He assumed a poor man’s lotus position on the bed, put his palms up in the air like he was checking for rain, and closed his eyes, focusing his anxieties into a ball and sending them down the trash hole of his consciousness. But ear pain, pulsing and spiked, plugged the hole like a clump of rotting food and sent the anxieties back up at him.

  His cell phone rang. The disgusting world called the seeker back.

  “Fuck it,” he said, and opened his eyes.

  A local number. What the fuck?

  “Shane, it’s Danika. From last night.” She giggled. “Remember me?”

  Remember me? They always said that.

  “What do you want?”

  She kept giggling. She was in on all kinds of jokes he’d been left out of. “You’re funny, man.”

  He said nothing. She breathed into the phone. His crotch kept humming. His ears rang like a starting bell.

  Remember when you were earnest and sincere, Shane? Remember when you thought that callous was something you had on the heel of your foot?

  “Your fucking dad attacked me,” he said. “He attacked me and banged up my ears. Did you know that?”

  She laughed. “He’s not my dad. He’s my stepdad.”

  “That explains a lot.”

  “Sorry?”

  Shane recalled the intimacy, however perverse, between stepfather and stepdaughter. Out the window, a crow took off from a tree. He poured a shot of Jack Daniel’s and took a manly slug.

  “He’s a dick either way,” he said. “He came at me with two fucking garbage —”

  “Hey, so are you going to put me on the guest list tonight?”

  He took another slug but missed. Bourbon ran down his shirt. He said nothing.

  “But come on!” Her voice grew heavy. “Come on, baby.”

  He imagined all kinds of geometry, and physics, and most of all biology.

  “OK,” she said. “See you tonight?”

  He grunted.

  “OK, see you later!”

  He threw the phone to the floor, reflected on temptation, rubbed his temples. When he returned to Los Angeles, he was going to figure this out. He would separate the seeker from the horndog, even try to make his parents understand that he was still their prodigal son, even though he looked like their worst nightmare and no way was he going to go back to singing about Christ. But for now he was going to find that band from the lobby. He wanted to be around them, and that felt pathetic but fuck it, he could show them how it was done. He was a veteran and they were obviously green. No band was that happy unless they were green, or Aerosmith.

  His cheeseburger came. The Dutch bellhop waited for a tip, so he signed over twenty euros. Fuck Joey. It was probably their money anyway. Managers made their living skimming cream off the top.

  Though Shane enjoyed his cheeseburger, a heaviness in his mouth warned him of great wrath to come; so much unfamiliar animal protein in one day was bound to cause a hydrochloric shitstorm. The meat tasted fantastic, but across the wilds of gastrointestinal time, he felt the faint charge of acidic explosion. He had eaten, in five hours, more animal flesh than he’d had in the preceding two years. Some serious blowback was coming down the pike.

  He chased it down with another shot of Jack, putting a sting on his throat. Was there any meal more rock and roll than burgers and whiskey?

  “No,” he said, and some of the brown drool escaped from his mouth. The taste hit his brain like a sloppy wet kiss from a beautiful girl.

  Rifling though Joey’s suitcase in search of money, he found a copy of Hustler, a half-used carton of Players, and a dime bag. Wrapped up in a bunch of panties lay a wad of twenties, from which he took two bills. He wrapped the rest up tight, trying to make it look like he’d never been there. Then he decided that Joey could go fuck herself and dumped the entire suitcase on the floor. A pack of cigarettes covered up a beaver shot like two sins trying to go clean. Damning his loss of control, he tried to put everything back the way it had been, but he only succeeded in unraveling the twenties from the panties. He grabbed a CD to give to that band he had met in the lobby. His ears hummed as if he lay underneath a Marshall stack. On VH1 Europe, Motley Crüe talked about their triumphant comeback from the wasteland of drugs and alcohol.

  “I was dead for five minutes flat,” Nikki Sixx said. “Like, for real, man, absolutely dead. Flatline. Seriously!”

  2

  WALKING IN THE HEART of the red-light district with Darlo, Joey watched the girls in their windows. They exerted a certain allure, all that impure skin promising absolution from tension, all those bodies without context. Though she wasn’t into pay-to-cum, she understood its power in the way she understood all the times people ordered Jägermeister; nasty shit could really blow your mind, but that didn’t mean you’d escape the consequences.

  Darlo, zombiefied, didn’t seem to notice any of it. She couldn’t be sure how much of his semi-catatonia had to do with her rejection of his advances, but she had to bring him back.

  Only one option lay before her. The logic of what she was about to do would reveal itself to her one day, maybe when they finally lay together.

  “We need to get you laid,” she said. “Come on.”

  Darlo perked up. “You sure?”

  “Of course I am,” she said, nodding hard before she could change her mind. Her leg began to ache again. She dry-popped Tylenol. Darlo, suddenly and distressingly back from the grave, started looking for someone specific.

  “She was, like, yea tall, and had a mass of black hair and full ruby lips. She was a real wet dream, and my credit card wouldn’t fucking go through.”

  Joey couldn’t believe how fast the prospect of pussy turned the drummer into a shaggy dog. Hackney’s face loomed up at her, all her failure summarized in the sultry gaze of an English stranger.

  Soccer hooligans were out in full force. “Glory, glory, Man United!” they sang, red in the face, happy as new millionaires.

  “I think she was over here,” Darlo said, pointing at a few windows, getting warmer. “She had the hottest curves, fuckin’ A, man, yeah, over here, the hottest little piece. I hope her fucking heavy is out to dinner. What a prick!”

  The drummer pointed at a girl in a candy-pink
window. She looked just the way he described her and wore a color-coordinated negligee. She stared at Darlo in a hostile way, confirming their history. Her stare made Joey jealous. The drummer held out his palm.

  “That’s her,” he said, tongue almost lolling. “Whatcha got?”

  Joey removed a few hundred-euro notes from her pocket and handed them over.

  “Here goes nothing,” she said. “That ought to take care of it.”

  Darlo snatched the bills with a piratical giggle and skipped over to the prostitute’s door. Ms. Pink glared at him through the glass, and he waved the cash like a white flag.

  “Hey, remember me?”

  Candy Pink shook her head.

  “No, look, I have money now! Look, I have money right here!”

  Dutchies on their way home from work took in the scene, expressionless; no doubt they saw an American Puritan prostrating himself at the legal pussy altar every day. Two dark-skinned guys in peacoats, smoking outside a fry joint, noted the situation with a Turkish call of encouragement. Joey watched the broken son of the porn king beg at the feet of this little pink-emblazoned Dutch lady. She battled back her jealousy and took a mental photograph.

  Candy Pink opened the door. The peacoated fellows clapped. Joey envied Darlo and his simple wants; all the drummer needed was some tail and he was all right. He could point at something in the physical world and see a solution. Joey’s satisfaction concerned slippery slopes of success, reputation, and power. You couldn’t grasp any of that in the palm of your hand. You could only piece together events and try to find a pattern. And the pattern for her was blind alleys, missed opportunities, possibilities squandered, a brand name that couldn’t buy respect, a bunch of bands that everyone ridiculed. And tonight she had to put the fucking franchise to rest. Tonight she had to preside at a dinner that would end as a total roasting, no matter who she put at either side of her.

  The Sharpie Shakes jingle wafted up from a radio passing by. Its bone-crunching tones surrounded Joey in a vise grip. That fucking jingle. They’d be swimming in hard licensing cash. But she had talked them out of it.

  Fun in the sun … you betcha … good times ahead … it’ll getcha!

  The jingle faded down the street like Fischer-Price thunder. Darlo had disappeared into the brothel. They were supposed to be at the hotel for dinner in less than an hour. She lit a Players and pulled from her jacket pocket her nickel-plated Warner Bros. flask, swag of good times long gone. She’d promised herself she’d go to dinner sober, but that jingle, tracking her, haunting her, burning her, had tipped over what was left in the wet, cold barrel of her resolve. Resolve seeped out of her pores, ran down the street in rank rivulets.

  She gulped her brandy. Applejack. She’d read somewhere that Ronnie Van Zant drank it constantly, strutted the stage aflame with it, wrote “Freebird” doused in it. So there had to be some magic in its bitter, chemical tones. She gulped again, blew smoke rings, and waited for his beautiful backcountry ghost to take her by the soul. When it did, she formulated one last, desperate gambit.

  3

  SHANE HEARD THE PARTY from way on down the hall. Good thing; he couldn’t remember the room number that sucker of a drummer had told him in the lobby. The copy of Rocket Heart weighed down his jacket. He knocked on the door of the Rodin Suite.

  A young woman dressed in impeccable turn-of-the-seventies cowgirl hippie chic answered the door. “Can I help you?”

  Little groupie, out of my way. I am Shane James Warner of Blood Orphans. I am the recipient of dirty money and negative press. I have scoured the earth, always seeking truth and God. I can teach you a thing or two. I am a veteran of the scene. I am a valuable resource.

  “What’s that smell?” she said. “Oh, man!”

  A chill went through him. He took a whiff. She was right. Why did he still smell like rotting peanut butter?

  The members of the band looked up from their couches, their sterling mirrors, their fashion magazines. They looked up from their fantasyland and saw the Ghost of Christmas Past. Shane might as well have been wearing chains and moaning. Parts of him might as well have been falling off.

  They pointed at him, exultant.

  “Hey, Dave, get out here! It’s Peanut Butter Bob!”

  “PB and J!”

  “Peanut fucking Butter Bob! Man, what’s up!”

  The drummer came out of the bathroom, zipping up. When he saw Shane he began to apologize. “I didn’t really think he’d come up here, I swear, I just —”

  But they waved him off.

  “Forget about it, Dave, all the freaks want to get to know you. Well, shit, PB and J, Dave said you smelled like peanut butter and damn if he wasn’t right, but have a fucking seat, take a motherfucking load off, we got too much good shit anyway, why be a hoarder? Why bogart all the goodness? Nay, we shall not! Nay, we shall smote our hoardage with equal and opposite kindness! A seat, smelly PB and J, take a seat!”

  Shane sat down at the fortress of white leather couches arranged in a square around the big glass table, which was littered with drug paraphernalia, cans of Heineken, and several bindles of coke. What would the Buddha say? Is all of this yin or is it yang? Stick or serpent? Heaven or hell?

  A girl emerged from the bathroom right behind the drummer, wiping her mouth.

  “Dave’s got a monster load in that little thing!” she said, and they laughed.

  “Even the drummer gets laid in this band!” yelled the guy who was certainly not the bass player; he had a shine on him that said, I stand at the front of the stage every fucking night. My crotch stares down young girls. I am a made man. “Are we not charitable? Are we not kind? Does Virgin Records not so completely own our ass? Are we not utter happy whores? Does Warner/Chappell not so completely own Ron’s songs?”

  Ron came up from the cocaine like a wave cresting. Taller than the others, with broad shoulders and big muttonchops framing his full lips, he appeared to be the natural leader of the group.

  “I am so owned, dudes.” He put his mouth on the cleavage of a young lady who wore red suede pants and had a bit of a roving eye. Then he grabbed both her tits and cradled them while she protested too much, falling into giggles and play slaps.

  “Oh, yes, oh my God, yes.” He laughed. “I am so owned. These are the fruits of my bounty. I am a whore in Babylon.”

  “No, Ron,” she said, thick eyebrows and all. “I am the whore of Babylon.”

  “Damn your eyes!” Ron said, apparently to himself.

  Another guy, whose mottled skin belied his happy vibe, laughed so hard he fell to the floor, coughing.

  Shane knew this scene, remembered the room at the Chateau Marmont they’d wrecked after their CD release show at the Wiltern, mayhem and bedlam and ahem, pass the cocaine. But even at the time Shane knew he’d been trying too hard, been too tense about it, as if someone were filming the destruction. Here in the Rodin Suite, the vibe was somehow mellow. There was no sense, even in the ribbing they gave Dave the drummer, that they meant any harm or gave two shits about how it all looked; he just sat there enjoying himself, having accepted his lot, like Ringo in A Hard Day’s Night. Shane liked that movie. Ringo was the jester and he took some shit from the other three, but you could tell they loved him. Even Paul, that smarmy little bitch. Why did everyone say to Shane that if they were the Beatles, Shane would be Paul? How come Adam got to be George? Shane was the spiritual one, goddamnit. He was the seeker. Adam wasn’t spiritual. It wasn’t fucking fair.

  “Do a line, Peanut Butter Nutter Fucker,” Ron said, pushing the small mirror at him. “Give it a go, Holmes.”

  “Much obliged,” Shane said, and bore down on it like a champ.

  “Hoover!”

  The sting in his ears pulled against the sting in his nose, which pulled against the cheers from the room.

  “Hoover-on-o-mous Bosch! He’s an artist!”

  The sting pulled him three ways until Wednesday, pulled him taut and turned him into an electric amphetamine Bermuda Tr
iangle.

  “Hoover mover and shaker!”

  A slap on his back. Congratulatory cheers.

  “Peanut Butter equals Hoover! Hoover-a-lanimous! Born in Hoovlakhastan!”

  He recognized that they had all kinds of sayings and codes. Blood Orphans had no codes, no secret handshakes, no winks, no shared anything. Except bitterness.

  He hit another line before they could stop him.

  “Lord have mercy! Good God, will someone testify for the Hoover Man!”

  Down there, riding that white rail, he saw the record cover. Four faces alone, staring away from each other. Four faces, zero friendship. Created just for the joke of Mammon. Created for a deadly sin. Staring up to the ground, to the earth. Down in limbo. Four faces in a devil’s bargain.

  “Hoover, damn it!”

  Four faces. No shared anything.

  “Wow!”

  He fell back on the couch, heart beating.

  “You son of a gun!”

  His stomach rumbled. That cheeseburger. Maybe he should go to the bathroom. But then the dudes were enacting a story from their recent airplane ride over here from America. They were called Tennessee, recently signed to Virgin and here on a press junket.

  “Tennessee what?” Shane asked, wiping his nose.

  “Just Tennessee,” said Dave the drummer.

  “After a state?”

  “Of mind.”

  Postnasal drip kicked in. Stimulant stalactites.

  “But you guys aren’t from Tennessee, right?”

  “Shut up, PB and J!” said Ron. “We’re telling a story!”

  Cocaine popped open his eyes. He just wanted to sit here forever, sit and be around their happiness, sit in rock-and-roll fellowship. For once.

  Ron told a story of his entrance into the Mile High Club and acted it out, twisting his body wildly, propping up his legs, thrusting.

  “I was like … this, and she was like … that, and we were like … God, man, can I do this! … We were like that!” Ron motioned to one of the ladies. “Baby, get under me to complete the image.”