Belief. The longer the word floated up there in his head, flapping like a tattered flag, the realer it became.
Darlo turned to Bobby and grinned. He actually felt shitty about unloading on him. Dude was just too easy to pick on. Dude was a stationary target.
“Dropped?” Darlo said. “No.”
Bobby turned to him, red in the face, still smarting. “Fuck you, Darlo,” he said, and stormed off too.
Shane and Adam looked at him with their stock expressions, unimpressed and amused, but Darlo had been stuck with them long enough to detect their disgust for picking on the weak. This disgust really hurt. He felt … what was it called? Vulnerable? He turned to Adam.
“Quad-band,” he said. “One more time.”
Adam handed the phone over. “Bobby,” he said. “Too bad.”
“He’ll be back,” Darlo said, with a false confidence essential to maintaining his sanity. “I’d like to see him go start a new band.”
“We’re all going to have to start a new band,” Shane said, and wolfed his scotch in one big non-Buddhist gulp. “We’re toast. Man, my ears are killing me.”
Dropped? Darlo turned the word over in his mind. He opened his mouth but could not say it, felt a dryness at the back of his throat, and returned to the memory of hovering over that prostitute’s throat in her little cum-’n-go. He had felt tears running down his face and thought that he might be bleeding. She had been trying to suppress a laugh, but when the tears started falling into her mouth, she started to show panic. And the more panic she showed, the more he cried. He had found himself in a loop there, a vicious cycle; the worse her discomfort, the more despairing he became, but he couldn’t stop because he was finally in a moment he had been searching for, looking down into her mouth for all those lost girls. Here he was, staring down the dark cave of memory, falling into loss.
“Darlo,” Shane said. “Be careful.”
His hand strangled the water glass. “Dropped? What the fuck?”
“You’re going to fucking destroy your hand, dude.”
The drummer imagined himself as handless. He imagined life as a handless porn maker, inheritor of his dad’s fortune after the fucker died awaiting trial for the deaths of numerous women, their bones found in the basement of his house. Their bones found directly below Darlo’s bedroom. Their bones found directly below his guns and his knives. Sitting on a throne of flesh.
He had installed the lock. A secret door behind a fake-fronted bookcase. Six sixty-four. Neighbor of the beast. They had laughed over that one.
Run a pole straight down from his bedroom floor and it would nestle in tibula and fibula. Run a pole from the den, where he’d fucked countless teenage girls, and find bones. Run dancer’s poles down through any point in the house. Find bones everywhere.
Bones everywhere. Darlo handless, trying to sift through them.
Find a graveyard under the house. Find Darlo the Handless, inheritor of ghosts, sifting through, on his flesh throne. Find him. This is his fate. Bone sifter.
He got up and raced out to the street. Standing outside the hotel, snow in his face, he dialed McFadden.
“Jesus, Darlo,” McFadden said. “This has to stop.”
“Hope I didn’t catch you in the middle of a really important squash game, Bob,” he said. “It’s just that you need to hear me out.”
He explained the theory again.
“Darlo, I’m really starting to worry about you. Are you losing it?”
“You fucking bet I am. How could I have ignored all those screams? Did I hear them from the kitchen while I was making dinner?”
“Darlo …”
“Like, what was I thinking the next morning, after that girl escaped and I went down to breakfast? Where the fuck was I when Dad took his Viagra and muttered, Well, shit, she was a cooze anyway. Where was I? All the times Dad was making his slap-and-burn movies, the ones that aren’t sold at the fucking Hustler store, the ones where he paid a lot of girls to get burned with cigarettes while they were taking on two guys. And where was I, besides upstairs jerking off or watching some fucking Bruce Willis movie? Where did I go, man? Those screams were like engines revving in a ditch.”
He bent forward, tears falling onto the flat Dutch earth. “How did this all happen, Bob?”
“Darlo,” McFadden said. “Just calm down.”
“Like revving engines,” he said, sobbing. “Bob, I’m part of it. Bob, my therapist, he said I was part of it and I laughed, but he was right.” He made his own turbine sound. He made his own grinding hum, sputtering and sliding down an incline, falling, white smoke floating away. “You have to help me, and help those girls in those dungeons. Help me.”
Spitting up dirt off the tires, fusing rubber with earth.
“Look, OK,” McFadden said. “Darlo, you need to calm down.”
“He wants to take them apart,” he said. “He wants them dismembered. He’s my dad, Bob. He’s my dad.”
McFadden’s breath on the line was a puffy, useless cloud. Seagulls flying through it.
“Darlo,” he said. “What I can do is …” but Darlo went numb again. Numbness overtook him, down in his own dungeon. Numbness fermenting, growing, distending, and now bursting forth with a hideous strength. So he tried to separate from it, tried to float away, tried to snap the line again and move high into the sky, but his body held him to the horizon. No new meridian. Same old latitude. The dungeon chains held him. Handless and sifting through those bones. Chained up.
An ocher swell of ancestral filth rolled him over. McFadden couldn’t help. Jesse couldn’t help. No one could help. Who knew what his father hid? Who knew and who cared? No one could help him avoid the wave of garbage and shit that was his life, that kept his sunlight low in the sky, that pinned his sunlight down.
16
IF SHANE HAD KNOWN Blood Orphans was being dropped at the start of the day, he would have been surprised, upset, defiant. But on the other side of this dies horribilis, after getting his ears clubbed by Danika’s stepfather, after the Starbucks baristas treated him like a worm, and after the humiliation at the hands of Tennessee and the vision of Fritz in the Dutch hallway, defiance had no bearing. That quadrant of bad experiences provided the tipping point for his distress, sent the treacle of failure cascading down over every pore of his frail, paper-thin confidence.
He left the restaurant without eating — they all did — and walked to the Star Club. Amsterdam was lit up in festive lights. Dutch Christmas season was in full force, and their take on the holiday was considerably more Brothers Grimm than New Testament. In front of a department store, handfuls of Dutchies were dressed as elves, but in blackface. These ebony goblins were called Black Peter — he had learned about them in church — and they gave out candy to children. One of them scurried up to the singer, yelled something happily in Dutch, and handed him a big swirl lollipop.
“Racist,” Shane said, and threw the lolly back in Black Peter’s face.
In the months before Rocket Heart’s release, Shane had lived in a spare room at Joey’s house in Silver Lake. The band had a residency at Spaceland, playing every Monday night, and he’d enjoyed walking from his temporary lodgings on Crestmont Avenue to the club. Life ran smooth as silk; girls were swallowing his sperm, the band was pretending to be a united front, and Silver Lake was just one of the lovely wildernesses upon which the seeker would travel, a place blessed with eternal, lovely light.
He pretended on these walks that he was a character in a Bible story, enacting some outtake from the rough draft, not good enough to make the final cut but still worthy of consideration in the best-selling book of all time.
Passing by the black-faced elves and on to the Star Club, he grafted that memory onto this evening’s walk. All it took was a little faith. He imbued the scene with that biblical outtake vibe.
The Star Club, which lay in a tricked-out basement on the Amstel, was set up with the bar on the right, pool tables on a raised platform to the left, and the stage
through swinging doors. It didn’t look anything like a place the Beatles would have played, with red velvet, marble tables, and brass handles. The Beatles would have had to pay five kroner just to peer inside. Bobby stood against the wall with a cute girl who looked like a kinky Raggedy Ann. She wore a tight skirt that appeared to be the skimpy remains of an Amish quilt, socks striped in yellow and purple, and well-kept crimson hair.
His tenuous generosity of spirit flagged when he saw Bobby, but Shane rallied. Bobby’s eternally grating personality wasn’t going to let him break ranks with his good mood. They’d actually had a nice time at the hotel room, hadn’t they? The singer appealed to the beat-up better angels of his nature.
“Nice to meet you, Sarah,” Shane said. “How did you and Bobby meet?”
“I think I picked him up today in a café.”
“Sounds good to me,” Bobby said, braying.
“Bobby is a great bass player,” Shane said. “He’s solid as a rock, even with his hands the way they are. He’s really someone you can depend on in the musical trenches. Have I ever told you that, man?”
Bobby look confused, rubbed his ass against the wall, breathed a little heavily. Shane realized he should have killed him with kindness from the beginning. Still, against all desire to the contrary, witnessing Bobby’s new love affair sent Shane’s good mood straight out his ass. The bass player had found his Narnia, had blundered into that magic wardrobe. But Shane had no such escape hatch. He had never found love in his time in Blood Orphans. He’d found Tantra and deep throat, threesomes and twins and bondage, but not love. He’d plowed almost as many female fields as Darlo, but not one of them had yielded a single flower of inner peace. Bobby mocked the honest travails of the vision quest, yet here he was, all up in this girl, their connection simple and effortless. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, Shane thought. What the fuck do I have to do?
Sarah’s eyes widened. “Danika?”
Shane turned around. Danika stood there, her dreads back-lit like a teen Medusa. “Sarah?”
They said a few things in Dutch and broke into laughter.
“This is my little sister!” Sarah said. “Little troublemaker!”
“You’re sisters?” Shane said.
“What a coincidence, no?” Sarah said.
“And how!” Danika said. She clutched Shane’s arm as if he’d escaped and she would never let that happen again. He’d dealt with crazy girls before, whose ability to fuck was inversely proportionate to their ability to function, but the way she put the grip on portended a whole new level of nutty-bitch bullshit.
“I saw them last night, right here.” Danika giggled. “I stood over there and stared at Shane all night. I knew he would be mine. And then, the poor thing …” She pouted and shook her head, releasing right under Shane’s nose that particular batch of pheromones that, to his dismay, had lost all their magic; now she just smelled like old roses. “Marcus found him in my bed and chased him out.”
“We heard,” Bobby said. “Marcus is a real live wire.”
Shane looked at Bobby. “You met him?”
“He’s not our father,” Danika said. “So he’s powerless. Mother won’t let him lay a hand. All he can do is whine.”
“And perforate eardrums,” Shane said. “He can do that. He’s real sharp with the tops of garbage cans.”
He thought that would be enough to break the happy spirit of the conversation. But they didn’t even notice.
“He seems like he’s been through a lot,” Bobby said.
“A lot of drugs,” Danika said.
“But he loves our mother,” Sarah said. “He’s good to her. He treats her like gold. Our regular dad is a hothead too, but no nice side.”
“They’re both idiots,” Danika said happily, squeezing his arm hard enough to cut off the flow of blood. “We’ll see you later. Shane and I have to go have sex in the alleyway.”
“No,” he said. “I can’t. I, uh —”
“Have to go talk to the Buddha?” Bobby said.
“The Buddha?” Danika said, and closed Shane’s mouth. “I am your little Shiva right here, baby. You don’t need no Buddha, let the motherfucker burn!”
Danika led him around back, past the knowing glances of dudes without dates. Never before had he found the certainty of sex in an alleyway to be unappealing. He tried to beg off. “I’m not up for it,” he said.
“Sure you’re not!” she said, and shoved him between two Dumpsters. “Give it to me!”
The alley stank of rotting meat and old beer. There was just no way. But she pushed against him, grinding in her best cat-in-heat, so he couldn’t move. She reached and fondled.
“Hands off,” he said. “It’s not an orange.”
She really put the grip on him, as if his complaint were a dare to continue.
“Fucking cut it out,” he said. “Let go, Danika.”
“Sure, baby,” she said, her breath smelling a little bit of licorice. “I’m a freak.”
“I think there’s a language barrier problem here. I think we’re having — ”
She squeezed tighter. His hand grabbed the offending arm. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“You like it,” she said. “That’s what your lyrics are about.”
“What?”
“Rough sex.”
“This isn’t rough sex. It’s torture. And I don’t write the fucking lyrics.”
She pulled at him like he was a cow.
“That’s enough!” he said, and shoved her off.
She lunged, grabbing at both sides of his head in another attempt at a hot embrace, so that her hands cuffed his ears, sending a shock of pain through him. Like stepfather, like stepdaughter. Shane was squeezed through some aperture, pulled though and squashed. He fell in pieces, in symmetry, crumbling like the demolition of an old building. No smoke rose from the sides, though. No professionals rushed in to assess success. No one shook in awe. No one whooped at the majesty.
17
JOEY STOOD IN THE STAR CLUB, drinking Jim Beam and fuming. All that planning and worry, she thought, and they don’t care. She had plotted out a seating arrangement, fretted all day, and worried that she might get physically assaulted. But they had barely noticed. All she got was attitude. What was wrong with these people? They were so undeserving of her anxiety. After all the work she’d done, this was how much they loved her?
A head full of snow didn’t make her feel any better.
You care too much, Joey, she thought. At the end of the day, you care too fucking much to ever be a very good manager. And now you’re stuck drinking cheap whiskey in a glass that smells like detergent.
She really wished she hadn’t destroyed that phone. Without it she could barely breathe.
All the work she had done, and they were ready to roll over. They were just so unimpressed with her call to arms. No guts at all, this band.
She sipped her drink. Shane came rushing by, clutching his ears. Behind him ran a young girl in black dreads, calling his name. The little baby Jesus stopped and turned around.
“Leave me alone! Crazy bitch! Crazy fucking family!”
“Shane!”
“Leave me alone!”
The singer and his Dutch black-dreaded girlfriend shot apart, moved as if a wave had cast them to separate shores. The girl lifted her hands to the sky and ran from the club. Shane grabbed at his ears and howled and ran through the swinging doors, out of sight. The bartenders, loading up the well, shared a laugh.
“Christ, Shane,” she said, and chewed on some ice.
Then Adam walked in. Without his Fu Manchu.
“You didn’t,” she said. “But you fucking did.”
He smiled, and she couldn’t believe her eyes. Without the fuzzy caterpillar ’tache, Adam was really cute.
“I needed a fucking change,” he said, eyes glowing. “I should have done it a long time ago.”
“But where?”
“Your hotel room.”
“Damn.”
She took a drag, squinting. “Did you put it in a bag? Like a fucking memento?”
He nodded. “You’re creepy, Joey.”
She crouched down, looked at him like an anthropologist poring over a specimen of some ur-creature. “Dude, I think you’re taller, too. That thing on your face was dragging you down.” She shook her head. “Keeping you hunched and hidden. You look good.”
He hugged her; it was like in movies when people overcome addiction and embrace the person who got them straight. She kept her arms in the air like she was sticking ’em up. She was just that stunned.
“Don’t tell the others,” he said. “It’s a surprise.”
He walked off into the club’s shadows. Joey sucked down her drink and ordered another. Fucking betrayer, she thought. You’re totally leaving me, us, the band. You finally figured out what was what. Good for you and fuck you and damn, Adam, you are a foxy piece of poncy ass, aren’t you?
Right on the heels of this scene, a young woman of staggering Black Irish beauty strode in with a guitar. Her ebony hair shimmered in the semidarkness, as if attracting all the visible light in the room. Behind her came a stylish-looking roadie who resembled Sting in Quadrophenia — she couldn’t remember his character’s name — with short white hair, a glossy two-hundred-dollar red Windbreaker, and cheekbones that cut glass.
Roadies, Joey thought. One more thing we never had.
Behind him came the manager, completing this triumvirate of gorgeous Anglos. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a shiny blue tie. A handkerchief stuck out from his breast pocket. Creases ran in fear from this guy.
That’s a rock-and-roll manager, Joey thought, wobbling on her heels. That’s a pro.
To her chagrin and excitement, the pro came over and ordered a drink. “Campari and soda,” he said, in a rough, all-business brogue. The bartender, who’d been insouciant to Joey, moved as if this guy were his boss.
Joey’s palms went sweaty. She wondered, Maybe I should fuck him. Maybe, through the osmosis of sweat and flesh, he’ll impart some managerial science. He’ll make me come and then he’ll call his good friend John Hackney and they can double-team me, thereby saving my career. Cowabunga.
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