Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

  The singer and the manager banged glasses together, and Bobby saw that time would do what it pleased with them. Their bullshit was going to melt in the convection of their shared traumas. Something dazzling might come of it. A strange hope for his band of brothers filled him.

  I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, he thought, and flexed his hands. All lost, like tears in rain.

  Then he saw Darlo coming toward them. His body tightened up, goodness flooded out, and he asked himself, Are you going to roll over again? Are you ever going to stand up and be heard? Are you ever going to show Darlo your stones? Are you ever are you ever are you ever?

  22

  PLAYING THE DRUMS would be nice. Playing the drums would be an island, a shore to wash up on. His band, his stupid band, coming to an end, but there would be other bands. Maybe they wouldn’t have a name as good as Blood Orphans, but at least he could get Adam involved. He had to be nicer to Adam. He would try to be nicer to everyone.

  Here was a chance to be nice. Entering the club, here was Bobby, the pitiful passenger — that had been a low blow, but it was true — here was Bobby standing at the side of the stage with his disgusting hands and some hot girl he’d managed to fool into liking him. Be nicer to everyone. Forever break the tether on that ancestral latitude. Find that new latitude through kindness.

  Why did Bobby always treat him like an enemy? Apparently Bobby didn’t recall how he’d saved his ass in that jail in Omaha, how the bass player had whimpered that his whole life was ruined, that he was going to embarrass his whole family of Sherman Oaks lawyers, doctors, and dentists, that he was going to have something called a permanent record. He had whimpered so that the other drunks and punks in the holding tank had started to imitate him, which only made him whimper more. Then he had started scratching at his hands like they were covered in hornets.

  “What’s with your girlfriend?” said some guy with a platinum crew-cut like Eminem’s, complete with the little hoop earring. “You want to get baby some wet wipes?”

  What a shitty night that had been. They were there because some guy had jumped Darlo backstage. A personal gripe.

  “My sister lost her legs in an accident!” he’d yelled. “ ‘Hella-Prosthetica’ this, you prick.”

  Darlo gave the guy one hard shot to the face and sent him off. Bobby threw in a kick just to be cool.

  “It’s a song, bitch,” the bass player said. “Go back to Moron School!”

  Too bad the guy’s brother was an Omaha cop.

  “Better hurry up,” Eminem said, back in the pen. “Baby might shit his pants.”

  Darlo was up and off the long bench. He had the guy’s shirt balled up in his fist. “Scum-fucker!” he said, and banged Eminem’s head against the wall.

  And what thanks did he get? Not much. When Eminem’s friends jumped up and beat his ass, Bobby yelled to the warden for help while Darlo covered his head.

  And what thanks did he get? That look, as he approached under pale light, the bass player clutching at this girl like she was a fucking tow rope.

  “What’s up?” Darlo said. Bobby said nothing, tight-lipped, and the girl smiled a little. “I said, what’s up, Bobby?”

  “Fuck you, Darlo.”

  “Bobby,” he said. “Just cool it.”

  “Don’t tell me to fucking cool it.” Bobby’s lips quivered. “Calling me a passenger.”

  “Can we just call a truce?” the drummer said, laughing to try to show what a nice guy he was. “Come on, dude, what do you say?”

  “Keep moving, you ass-wipe.”

  “Baby,” the girl said, moving a little in his Mummy grip. “Take it easy.”

  “That’s right,” Darlo said. “Listen to your girlfriend.” He stuck out a hand. “I’m Darlo Cox.”

  Bobby knocked him down and started kicking. Darlo melted into the blows; a beating was just what he wanted, really, and what he deserved. After all, he was complicit in the pain and death of, like, a hundred girls. He had tuned out all their screams. He had pretended they were crickets fighting over leaves and dirt. He had sat at the pool, stoned and staring at trees in the wind, while his dad did his dirty work. He deserved a beating bigger than an army of Bobbys could give.

  Some great chain held him still, the dauphin of the devil hung out and swatted. It felt right. Tethered. Low in the sky. No sunlight.

  “Monster!” Bobby yelled, and nailed him in the head.

  23

  WHEN BOBBY PUNCHED DARLO, his bandages shot off, revealing his hands in all of their lymph-and-pus majesty. Skin rose up through wet infection and glistened like a damned newborn.

  He absolutely meant to kill him. He absolutely meant to silence the monster forever. Guttural screams were the best he could do. Bandages snapped free like restraints on Frankenstein.

  Darlo didn’t put up a fight. He just curled up on the floor, covered his head with his hands, defended his soft parts. Bobby heard Darlo crying but didn’t believe it for a second.

  Shane and Joey pulled him off. Adam had jumped offstage but stopped before joining in, standing there as if he were unsure whether he was now participant or spectator.

  The unkillable, on the floor, curled up in a ball. The Blob.

  As manager and singer dragged him back into the green room, with Sarah following, Bobby thought about the Omaha jail cell where he and Darlo had shared incarceration, hearing the Sharpie Shakes jingle come out from the night warden’s radio before Darlo got beat up for no clear reason. Such real times, in that hot Nebraska clink. He missed the drummer already.

  They threw him to the couch, tsk-tsking him.

  “I just wanna fucking kill him,” Bobby said.

  “Well, don’t,” Shane said. “Fucking get over it. Right, Sarah?”

  “Yes, yes,” Sarah said, stroking Bobby’s hair. “It’s crazy, babe.”

  Bobby harumphed and flexed his mitts.

  “Your hands,” Joey said. “I can’t remember the last time I saw them without Band-Aids.”

  “Pretty disgusting, huh?”

  Applause went up for Deena Freeze and the former guitar player of Blood Orphans. They sat there like pallbearers on a smoke break.

  “He’s pretty amazing,” Shane said, touching his ears as if they were precariously glued to his head. “I’ve never seen him onstage. He’s a wizard.”

  “And he’s gone,” Bobby said. “Long time gone. Can you believe he shaved the fucker off?”

  “Weirds me out,” Joey said. “End of a fucking era.”

  Shane plopped down on the black leather couch and took a Stella from the ice chest. Then he took a few hundred-dollar towels and gingerly propped them behind his head. Joey cracked open a bottle of Jack Daniel’s with a ribbon around the spout, on which was scrawled, “Welcome Blood Orphans.”

  “I’ve been expecting you to snap like that for months,” Shane said. “But I thought when you did I’d be the one you came after.”

  “He called me a passenger,” Bobby said. “He used the fucking P-word, dude.”

  An awkward silence ensued. Shane picked at the label of his beer. Joey nodded slowly and popped another Tylenol.

  “Maybe I am a fucking passenger,” Bobby said. “Fine. I can handle that. I mean, I can try to handle it. But it was a cheap shot.”

  Having rejoined Deena Freeze onstage, Adam broke into another taunting shredder of a solo. They looked at each other with the collective awareness of the abandoned.

  “Let’s get you some Band-Aids,” Joey said, rummaging through the cabinet, grabbing a first-aid kit. She started in with the nurse act. Shane cracked a beer and handed it to Bobby, grimacing at the Mummy unplugged.

  Adam showed up, looking triumphant. His black eye was perfect and huge, like he’d paid a pro to pop him, some weird masochism kink. They applauded.

  “Nice job, man,” Shane said. “You kicked a lot of ass up there.”

  “Hear, hear,” Joey said. “Looks like you got yourself a job.”

  “I d
on’t know,” Adam said, but smiled like, Yeah, absolutely.

  “You deserve it,” Bobby said, looking up from bandage application. “After all the abuse we put you through.”

  “She’s hot, too,” Shane said. “She doesn’t need a backup singer, does she?”

  Adam hedged for a second, then wiped his mouth, looking for a mustache that wasn’t there.

  “No,” he said. “She doesn’t.”

  24

  DARLO HALF-CRAWLED UP THE Star Club stairs and stumbled into the snowy Dutch night. His nose bled. Blood had a nice tang. Iron was a rush. He fell onto a bench and pulled Adam’s quad-band from his pocket.

  He was coming out of the ring of a fight that had lasted years. In the last round, the champion had fallen. In the last round, the challenger had fucking arrived. It always came down to the size of the fight in the man.

  Could he snap the tether? Could he float above the earth, once and for all?

  There was one last way to jump free. Here was a last shot he could take to understand, one last way to cut the Daddy cord, one last way he could rise, rise, rise over the horizon, shine all day, never be pulled down into ancestral night.

  How strange it was that some numbers came together in the mind. Like a chronic condition just waiting for the right moment.

  In a white-walled, natural wood-grain midwestern kitchen, a middle-aged woman with long black hair answered the phone.

  “Mom?” he said. “Mom?”

  25

  AS THEY SET UP, Adam watched the crowd thin out to … nobody. Nobody watched them set up. Nobody hollered out their name. Twenty-some people hovered on the fringes, here to see a friend, here to cut a deal, here to do anything but see Blood Orphans.

  Shaving that mustache off his face had left him feeling heady and giggly. He’d gone up to Joey’s room after she’d tried to shock them with the label droppage news — watching her stammer at their collective lack of giving a shit had been rough — and stared at himself in the mirror. He realized that the mustache had been a way out of being seen, a way for people to very quickly come to the same opinion his brothers had come to every time they looked in his direction; that he was some stupid geek loser. It was his way of staying subjugated, staying down. But Deena Freeze had been blown away. And so had her swank manager. And so had he, sitting on Morten’s bed and blasting through Bach like an afterthought, wondering, Yeah, why are you in this band, really? Why do you insist on playing the fool? So he put soap and water to the Fu Manchu and said, See you later, crutch.

  Still, he reached for it every five minutes and came up blank, stroking air.

  Bobby’s cute girlfriend sat on a stool, bopping up and down with a drink. Maybe, Adam thought, he would do a painting of the two of them and present it to the bass player for his next birthday. Of all of them, he liked Bobby the most, and that made no sense at all.

  The bass player came waltzing over. His new Band-Aids had hermetically sealed off all skin.

  “This is the end,” he sang. “Beautiful friend.”

  “This is the end,” Adam sang back. “My only friend.”

  They noodled together, laughing.

  “That’s the Doors, right?” Shane asked, adjusting the mic stand. “We can do the Doors if you want. Let’s just not do any of our fucking songs. I never want to sing them again.”

  “Amen to that, bitch,” Bobby said. “You in on that, Adam?”

  “Sure.” He looked at Shane. “Think tonight you could skip the religion?”

  “Sure,” Shane said, “if you’ll turn down your amp. For once.”

  Bobby did a few bass runs, then walked over and threw a good-time shoulder into Shane. Smiles crossed their mouths like low, fast-moving clouds.

  Joey speed-hobbled to the stage. She still had her heels on.

  “Can I do an introduction tonight?” she said. “Just for old times’ sake.”

  “Find Darlo,” Shane said. “Find Darlo and you can sing lead for the whole fucking set.”

  Adam watched Bobby noodle on the bass, testing out parts way past his ability. That was the thing about passengers; they just wanted their ideas to be heard. Adam was ridiculed, but he sure as shit wasn’t ignored. Half the licensing royalties were no better proof.

  “You want to bend that last E,” he said. “And then slide your index finger up the fret a little slower. It’s wobbly right now.”

  “Check,” Bobby said, nodding, a student. “Cool.”

  But still, Adam understood the pathology of the passenger. No one in his family had thought him useful. No one had thought him a contributing member of the Nickerson Motorcycle Club. He was the familial whatever, never needed and never noticed. Watching Bobby tangled up in blue, Adam recognized that it was the duty of one passenger to be sympathetic to another.

  Bobby gazed up from the hard translucence of perceived identity, through the years of psyching himself out, once soft and pliable, but now solidified in a prism of nonnegotiable second-classdom. Maybe being back in Los Angeles would soften up the resin and set Bobby free, but for now, Adam knew, camaraderie could only operate as a little hammer tap on the hardened orange casing, the echoes of which would fracture the distance. He threw vibes at the bass player. He threw vibes like daggers, trying to pierce through to something real. Arise, bass player, from your persona prison. Arise, and leave your hands behind. Arise.

  26

  DARLO CLUTCHED THE PHONE to his ear and listened to his mother recount his birth, how he had been tangled up in his umbilical cord. The doctors had panicked, but according to Ann Atchison, from whom Darlo inherited his shaggy black hair, tall frame, and natural sense of rhythm, he had fought and screamed his way out of it.

  “You kicked hard,” his mother said over the static. “You weren’t going to let anything stop you from being born. It hurt like heck, but you were a fighter. You were determined as all get-out to live. Your father was there. Don’t think he wasn’t. And he was terrified. He was scared to death for my life and yours. He was doing his best.”

  She tried to explain the roots of David Cox’s limitations, what made him a man so determined to hurt and exploit, but it was all pop psychology to Darlo, his dad’s distant father and deathly quiet mother, an upbringing of total order and no dissent in postwar Canoga Park. No questions were being answered. Only excuses to explain away the ancestral latitude.

  When he told her about the arrest, her voice lost composure. “Do you remember the Wonderland murders?” she asked.

  He wiped his cheeks, and bit his lip so he wouldn’t start crying again. “Dad likes to talk about them,” he said. “He talks about them like they’re an anniversary for something.”

  “Yes, Darlo. An anniversary. Do you know that we used to have some of the people who died at Wonderland over for dinner all the time, back in the house on Mount Olympus? They were friends of John Holmes, so your father welcomed them in, even though they were mad with poison in their bodies, wide-eyed. John was a lost soul, looking for a reason to be. He was a drifter, and a liar, and he didn’t have a real friend in the whole wide world.”

  Darlo realized that his mother had most probably had sex with John Holmes. In the past this would have been a point of perverted pride, but now he couldn’t make sense of the separation between celluloid and reality.

  “The night those murders happened,” she continued, “your father got a call from Ron Lanius, one of John’s friends. They were having a party, some fun, come on over to the Wonderland house. Come on over, David, Ron said. Let me blow your mind. I was eight months pregnant with you and wasn’t feeling well. Your dad may not have listened to me very much, but he was crazy about you — even then just the mention of his child could stop him a little. He talked about his cursed bloodline and how you would be free of it. He said you were going to validate the good side of him, that through you he would leave his ghosts behind. And so I played sick, because Lanius and his friends terrified me, and I knew that sooner than later something awful was going to h
appen to them. It was a card I played. I had no idea what was going to happen that night, but I knew that at the very least your father would come home with a lot of drugs in him and a bad attitude.”

  “You saved his life.”

  “I don’t want that responsibility. I didn’t tell people about it.”

  “He has a wall devoted to pictures of the murders. He said that they were friends of his. Why didn’t I ever think there was more to it?”

  “The idea of you,” she said, “wiped clean some curse. The idea of you, floating in the air, an angel to him already, an angel.”

  She drifted from the phone. He waited.

  “Angel,” she said, and he heard his mother weeping, free of Christian Iowa static. “My angel.”

  A world of explanations about his dad, and his role in their sad life together in that Normandie mansion materialized around him, began to take shape, mysterious, permeable, thawing.

  “I’m lost, Mom.”

  She wept, or maybe it was static coming back. “Pick yourself up now. Get up from where you’re standing. Breathe, Darlo. It’s OK now. I love you.”

  Those four Wonderland victims, those girls in the basement, the desperate pull at his heart when he had sex — these were connected, part of some through-line, and Darlo felt a growing cohesion to some system that ran him, some resolution in this sequence of suffering, some minor order. A shift occurred inside his emotional bedrock, loosening up what lay strangled beneath the hard sediment. This system was a part of him and was his responsibility to fix, untangle, make right. He wiped his eyes and breathed. He breathed easy, as if some weight had been released.

  “I’ll call you when I’m home, Mom,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Darlo,” she said, “you have your whole life ahead of you.”

  He hung up, holding Adam’s phone in his palm like a broken bird as tears ran down his face. On tour a few months before, he had sat in a Minneapolis multiplex on a day off and watched a movie about the Wonderland murders, with Val Kilmer as John Holmes. He’d laughed at the utter farce-itude of the film, full of bumbling meth monsters and stock organized criminals, with Holmes portrayed as Wile E. Coyote on speed, goofy, loose-tongued, full of big dreams. But now he saw unvarnished scenes of despair, gore, and gloom, a world of misery, a world with no way out. That was his father’s world, the anatomy of porn melancholy, without light or hope, long days in a white shag-carpeted house, trying to stave off the hollow choices and their brittle, empty consequences.