The room erupted in cheers, and the first chords of “Hella-Prosthetica” rang out. Ironists my ass: it was a damn good thing no one could hear the lyrics. That the song existed at all seemed ridiculous to Bobby now, but at the time they had been storming some imagined barricade of taboo, with this paean to horny amputees as the battering ram.
Apparently the guys in Tennessee knew all the lyrics.
Darlo walked over with two cans of Heineken. “Some songs land people in jail,” he said, and handed one to Bobby. “Ain’t that a bitch?”
“ 'Tis,” Bobby said, knowing that the bringing of beer was an apology of sorts. Darlo’s face was still puffed up from tears, and Bobby let his anger go. Maybe, just for a night, he ought to cut the drummer some slack.
People sang the song out. It was cute. They sipped their beers.
“Shit is fucked up,” Darlo said. “Shit is so fucked up right now, Bobby. I ain’t got no label and I ain’t got no dad.”
“Sorry about the news.”
“Whatever.” He shrugged. “Or not whatever. Doesn’t make a difference. Fucker’s been a real dirtbag, and if I can help send him to the clink, that’s fine. Oh shit, hold on.” He took out Adam’s phone and stared at it. “Thought it was ringing,” he said. “I’m waiting to hear back from that asshole Jesse.”
“He’s an asshole, all right,” Bobby said. “Fucker sold me an eightball of powdered sugar.”
Darlo winced. “I told him to do that.”
“You’re a real piece of work, Darlo.”
“I’m gonna try to be better. Don’t look at me like that — I mean it.”
Bobby nodded, rolling his eyes, and watched Sarah talk to Adam and Shane over at the keg. They were telling her some story that involved a large object falling on their heads, laughing as they ducked for cover. Maybe it was the bird of happiness taking a big dump. Either way, he warmed to the image — his brothers, protecting her.
“That wasn’t such a bad show tonight,” Darlo said. “Though I think we lost them when we tried ‘L.A. Woman.’ ”
“For sure,” Bobby said. “Shane isn’t exactly Mr. Mojo Risin’. Though Adam nailed all those snaky guitar parts.”
“Doesn’t he always,” Darlo said. “Fucking slayer, that guy. Even without the Fu Manchu.”
Bobby grunted. Darlo picked at the tab on his Heineken.
“So,” the drummer said. “What the fuck are you gonna do when we get home? ‘Cause I want to figure this whole thing out, bro. I want us to not fuckin’ hate each other.” He lowered his eyes. “We should hang out.”
Bobby made to scoff, and then he thought, This is a peace offering. Who knows what might come of it? A certain sense of satisfaction dawned in him. Had Bobby not watched the drummer fall apart? Had he not, by all appearances, gotten the girl? His customary hatred and envy were absent; instead, he felt a vague, diffuse affection for Darlo, and the knowledge that he had no idea what was coming next.
“Fine,” he said. “Just don’t make fun of my hands. And I want a hundred bucks for that faux-caine.”
Darlo nodded in contrition. They listened to the song, bobbed their heads up and down. Bobby felt like he was on a blind date.
“I still think you and me got mixed wrong,” Darlo said. “Fucking Sheridan. Mixed us too far down, that fucking jam-band idiot. You and me. No fuckin’ thunder. What’s rock and roll without a whole lotta thunder?”
“Jazz,” Bobby said. “Ugly, despicable jazz.”
“Word,” Darlo said, and they clanked cans.
The song rose toward the crescendo. All four members of Tennessee were gathered up, arms on each other, singing about having sex with girls who were missing their legs. Bobby watched Adam and Joey bob their heads and laugh like they’d never heard the song before, like they couldn’t believe anyone could have such bad taste. Then one of the guys in Tennessee grabbed Shane and screamed for him to take it, right as the final chorus kicked in. The dreadlocked Christian Buddha seeker-fool pogoed up and down. He guzzled some beer, hugged his new boyz, then poured the rest of the can on them as they shook in rapture. He counted off the lead-in, held his arms high like a spirit risen gloriously from limbo, and threw his body into it. From the very top of his lungs, he sang the song back to heaven.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Eileen Pollack and Laura Kasischke for helping make this book shine.
Thanks to Peter Ho Davies, Ray McDaniel, Patsy Yaeger, Michael Byers, and Nicholas Delbanco for advice on matters critical, creative, and theoretical, and the University of Michigan, Helen Zell, and the Rackham School of Graduate Studies for essential and generous support.
Thanks to Ayesha Pande, dedicated agent of tireless energy and natural grace.
Thanks to Reagan Arthur, Michael Pietsch, and all at Little, Brown, for taking a chance on me and being so excited about it.
Thanks to Scott Michael for providing suggestions from the real world, as well as reminders on laws of physics and probability.
Thanks to the fellows with whom I have shared vans, stages, hotel rooms, and sunsets: Bo Gilliland, John Roderick, Jeramy Koepping, Cody Burns, Eric Corson, Chris Caniglia, and Sean Nelson. Well played, sirs, well played.
Final, profuse, and endless thanks to Anna Barker, for your love.
MICHAEL SHILLING is a lecturer at the University of Michigan, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing. His stories have appeared in The Sun, Fugue, and Other Voices. A recovering rock musician, he played the drums in The Long Winters, as well as in numerous other bands in Seattle. He is currently working on a novel set in Victorian England.
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Reading Group Guide
Rock Bottom
A NOVEL
Michael Shilling
A conversation with Michael Shilling
You spent several years as a touring rock musician. What elements of your experience informed the writing of Rock Bottom?
There are two kinds of rock bands. The first is the young and skinny people in their twenties, drug Aardvarks with no nutritional needs except beer, cigarettes, and two hours of sleep who, day after day, wolf a bag of Doritos for dinner, blast through an hour-long set, and then abuse themselves all night with the help of total strangers. The other variety is usually older and always weaker of constitution. They need the occasional home-cooked meal and as much sleep as the next accountant or dentist, and like to argue for hours about what Gore would have done as president. That was the band I was in. You want to read that novel?
There are five different points of view in Rock Bottom. Why did you choose this structure, and how did you go about finding the balance between these different vantages?
After politicians, rock bands are the ultimate unreliable narrators. Though the comedy in Rock Bottom is what gets the reader’s attention, at its heart I wanted the story to be about people coming to tough terms with the choices they had made, and how those choices affected others around them. By having such a varied set of viewpoints, I could accomplish this thematic objective and provide a sense of solidity to the narrative, so that any epiphany or understanding that a character arrived at could be emotionally cross-checked by another. To mangle the words of Joan Didion, people in vans have to construct stories in order to live, and those stories are often ridiculously self-serving. Nobody in Blood Orphans passes even the lowest bar of objectivity, so this way the reader is the final judge, which is not something I strive for, but in this case is what served the story.
Is this “emotional cross-checking” part of the motivation to have the manager play such an important role and be a woman?
Very much so, but it cuts both ways. Joey’s carrying around her black-magic bag of delusions too, and having the four members of the band around to grab that bag and throw it into the nearest Dutch canal sends her on her own compelling journey of reckoning. Of course, having a woman’s touch — even that of the coked-up, gimp-legged, bitter-as-horseradish variety — was essential to facilitate emotio
ns from the dudes that they would never have experienced if left to their own, all-male devices.
Speaking of which, why did you choose to set the book in Amsterdam?
Originally, I thought that Amsterdam was a good setting because it mirrored the dynamics of rock band life — known for its sinful, libertine ways, but in its heart very buttoned up and, in terms of manners and social graces, surprisingly conservative. But by the time I realized what a dumb simplification that was, I was already knee-deep in the draft, so it never changed. In the end, I think I set it there because Amsterdam is very pretty, and if I’m going to spend two years in the same creative place, I’d prefer it to be pretty.
What were the challenges you faced by setting the novel over the course of a single day?
When you have less than twenty-four hours, a story line can easily become contrived and full of expedient moments. I didn’t want the changes the characters went through to come cheap; so, certainly, creating an organic plot was difficult. Also, with such a tight time frame, the structure of the story seemed to either completely work or fall flat on its narrative ass. When you’re telling a story that has weeks, or even days, of present action, you can move stuff around. With only one day, if you change the time that one character gets to one place, everything else has to shift. So revising was a bit scary. But when I was in Amsterdam I walked the routes of all the characters to make sure I wasn’t creating any physical or temporal impossibilities, so that matter was pretty nailed down. That said, it took a while to get the sequence of events to work in a believable manner, but when I did I had one very tight story.
A while? How long did Rock Bottom take to write?
About ten months to draft and a year to revise. And revise. And revise. I’d written two, uh, “practice novels” already — just saying it makes my hands ache — so I had a pretty good understanding of what it feels like when you’re on the right track and, even more important, what it feels like when you’re on the wrong one. There is no greater gift to a writer than the sixth sense that what you’re working on is genuinely bad. Of course, if I hadn’t written that other stuff, I would have never been able to write something pretty decent. Or at least that’s what I tell myself to stop from crying.
Any writing advice you’d care to share?
I read an interview with Peter Carey, whose work is a genuine treasure of narrative artistry and flat-out prose chops, in which he basically said that writing is a last-person-standing enterprise. If you do it long enough with some amount of regularity, you will probably produce something good that gets published. I think that’s true, because if you stay at it for five, ten, fifteen years, you probably don’t suck at it. And also, improvement is exponential in this line of work, which, because it’s such a lonely endeavor, is a truth that is quite satisfying. The drafting I’m doing on the new novel is still pretty rough, but not anything like the crud I used to turn out. I don’t have to drag the dream into existence as much anymore.
Care to share what you’re working on?
I’m writing a novel set at the crossroads of Regency and Victorian England — the late 1820s — involving some of the characters and incidents from Jane Eyre and set at Thornfield Hall, but existing in a completely different narrative context with a whole new cast of strivers, connivers, grotesques, and romantics. I am trying to combine the dark fairy-tale fabulism of Angela Carter with the plot-driven, hard-boiled push-and-shove of James Ellroy, all the while keeping in mind British class dynamics to create, as Ellroy called it, a reckless verisimilitude. The beauty of a story like this is connecting the desires and motivations of all the characters — from the lowest scullery maid to Rochester himself — while keeping the plot organic and fluid. It’s a large undertaking, but I like a challenge. If I go down in flames, at least it’ll be in a blaze of glory.
Questions and topics for discussion
1.Of the five main characters in Rock Bottom, which one did you find the most compelling, and why? Which character did you find the most humorous?
2.Amsterdam plays an important role in the novel. Discuss the ways in which the city influences the actions of each band member.
3.Rock Bottom is a no-bruises-spared portrayal of the rock-and-roll world. In your opinion, which band member gains the most from the difficult experience the band endures?
4.What do you think of the “friendship” between the band members? Which characters did you feel were really friends at the beginning of Rock Bottom? Did that change in the course of the novel?
5.What is the importance of Joey in the story of Blood Orphans? What does she ultimately learn from her experience as manager of the band?
6.Discuss the idea of forgiveness in Rock Bottom. How important is forgiveness to the members of Blood Orphans?
7.Darlo starts off as a truly vile character, yet as the novel progresses he is forced to confront much of his past behavior. Does he eventually find a conscience?
8.The love story between Joey and Darlo is, to say the least, a fairly unconventional romance. In what ways does their relationship impact the lives of the other band members?
Suggestions for further reading
Some of Michael Shilling’s favorite books:
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
The White Album by Joan Didion
American Tabloid by James Ellroy
A Public Burning by Robert Coover
The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens
Bear and His Daughter by Robert Stone
Frank Zappa’s Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play by Ben Watson
Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout
Salem’s Lot by Stephen King
Among the Thugs by Bill Buford
Money by Martin Amis
The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre
Self-Help by Lorrie Moore
Observatory Mansions by Edward Carey
The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O’Connor
The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by StanleyBooth
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Libra by Don Delillo
To Bedlam and Part Way Back by Anne Sexton
Mystery Train by Greil Marcus
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
The Medium Is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe
Chasing the Sea by Tom Bissell
Lord Weary’s Castle by Robert Lowell
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Rubicon Beach by Steve Erickson
Budding Prospects by T. C. Boyle
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
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