Rock Bottom Read online

  Europeans all spoke American differently. Each had cobbled together a personal mishmash of idiom, cliché, and insult. Marta, the band’s continental publicist, punctuated everything with “to the max!” She consistently described people she didn’t like as “total blowjobs.” President Bush was “a cowboy fascist” and Ronald McDonald was an “American materialist ass-clown.” The one time she and Bobby had slept together, she had whispered “Hit that magic kitty” over and over into his ear, her breath a mixture of pork and whiskey, until he went soft.

  Naturally, Darlo had refused her first. But whatever.

  “She’s a cooze,” he’d said, and left the club with twins.

  Natty Dread introduced himself. Ullee. Another wimpy Euro name.

  “I am a musician too,” he said. “We play a lot here in Amsterdam. Jazz and rock, kind of together, kind of at the same time. Simultaneously, dude.”

  “Jazz is nice,” Bobby said. He hated jazz. “Cool.”

  “We are called Past Tense,” Ullee said. “We played Rotterdam once, and Maastricht too. Groningen, we never played there.”

  “I was mugged in Groningen,” Bobby said.

  “Ah, mugged,” Ullee said wistfully, as if remembering the most beautiful sunset. “Mugged is not fun.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “And what is the name of your band?”

  “Blood Orphans.”

  Ullee scrunched his face up. Bobby waited for the sad smile of recognition, for all those ad buys that Warners had taken out in a hundred magazines to pay off. But those ads had been pulled long ago. And that smile never came.

  “Blood Orphans,” Ullee said. “What does that mean?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Bobby said. “I used to think it had to do with brotherhood. But now I’m pretty sure it’s about death.”

  The Run Lola Run girl giggled. He stole a look at her, but she appeared to be giggling at the screen, not his weak attempt at wisdom.

  Ullee giggled too. His onion skin stretched into a smile. Some real light showed up in his eyes.

  “OK,” he said. “That’s a good name.”

  Bobby decided that Ullee was his guardian angel, come to grant him three wishes. That was how it worked in Twilight Zone episodes, and Blood Orphans had long since fallen into that fifth dimension little known to man, of sight, of sound, of mind.

  The first wish would be two years of his life back, before Blood Orphans existed, so he could be scrubbed of the different emotions that accompanied this downward spiral: excitement, joy, confusion, worry, disappointment, and finally despair. He didn’t need these emotions anymore. He would find others. Just put me back in my apartment, up there in the loft with the Sabbath posters, the autographed Jet Li lithograph, and the vague smell of cat piss, tuck me in, raise the moon high over Costa Mesa, and let me sleep it all away.

  The second wish would be for Jessica to fall in love with him again, truly, madly, deeply. Give her a tattoo of his name over her carotid artery. Make every dream she ever had be about what a self-assured, centered, and well-endowed guy he was. Have every one of her paintings be epic scenes of him in Viking gear, standing at the mast of a mighty warship, ready to fight the hordes, singing and crying. Her strong prince. Her Nordic master. Her Overlord.

  The third wish would be for someone to slice up Darlo’s face until it looked like a Levolor blind. Then Jessica would never have fucked him.

  “We broke up a year ago!” she’d said. “You have no right to get mad!”

  Bobby took another bite of the mazette, moaning in approval. His dreadlocked guardian angel smiled, and Bobby smiled back, held his breath, anticipated the good news.

  “I am trying not to be rude,” Ullee said. “But dude, your hands look like cottage cheese.”

  A warm wave of shame, like pissing on oneself, passed through him.

  “What happened to them?” Ullee said, but the bass player was already drifting, humiliated, over to a computer, his head down, pastry and coffee held in his itching putridities.

  Run Lola Run looked up at him and smiled. In pity, no doubt.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi,” he said, and looked down.

  While you were lost in the swirling toilet of tour, e-mail was one of those valuable life preservers that kept you from going right down the hole. It gave you some sense that there might be a more humane life somewhere over the broken-glass rock-and-roll rainbow, an engagement with those unenslaved by the wet dream of stardom.

  Three messages awaited him. First up was Dave, his roommate in LA, saying, No, I can’t pick you up at the airport, and anyway, what do you want a ride for, you’re the guy on MTV, why don’t you get a limousine? Next up was Giles, a small, androgynous slip of a boy they’d met on their second tour of England, wondering when they’d be back on the sceptred isle. While high on ecstasy, Bobby and Giles had made out in the bathroom of the London Hard Rock Café.

  “I can’t forget you man,” wrote the androgyne. “Think we’ll ever cross paths again?”

  Bobby winced. One more dumb fucking thing he’d done on the long march to show-biz irrelevance.

  “Kill me,” he said, deleting the e-mail. “Please kill me.”

  The third and final e-mail was subject-lined Proust Personality Test for Blood Orphans.

  “Hi Blood Orphans,” wrote Rachel from Los Angeles. “I saw you guys on Carson Daly the other night and thought you were great. So funny and rocking and hot. Really hot!”

  They were showing the band in reruns? More likely her brother TiVoed them a year ago and she was confused.

  “I went out and bought Rocket Heart like, the next day, though it was kind of hard to find. But the Tower in Anaheim had it. Totally awesome! Your publicist at Warners gave me your e-mail addys. He said you guys had been on the road for, like, a long time, and needed encouragement.”

  Back in the days of wine and roses, interviews were everywhere, swirling around them like palm fronds over Egyptian monarchs. But they hadn’t had an interview request in forever. And if one showed up at Warners, there was probably a standing order to flush it down the toilet.

  Some intern hadn’t got the memo. Awesome.

  “Anyway,” Rachel continued, “I’m a psych major at UCLA, and in my seminar on cognitive dissonance my prof handed out this crazy thing written by Marcel Proust, a questionnaire used to gauge one’s personality. They use it in Vanity Fair to interview celebrities — I’m also a freelance journalist for music webzines — it’s really fun! — and I’ve been using it for all my interviews. It’s attached. Would you mind filling it out? It’s normally like thirty questions but I’ve narrowed it down to eight because I know you’re busy.”

  Proust. He had always wanted to read Proust, but the books were so big.

  “Thanks a lot! You guys rawk!”

  Bobby looked at his hands. Could they take a little typing? Why not. He hadn’t imagined the band still had fans. Maybe Rachel was a portent of happy days ahead.

  “What,” read question one, “do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?”

  “Right now,” he replied. “Stuck two-plus years into the worst experience of my life. All my dreams dead and my hands destroyed.”

  A little tension left his neck.

  “Where,” the next question read, “would you like to live?”

  He tapped on the dirty keyboard, stained with the muck of backpackers and itinerants. “Somewhere I never have to fucking see the faces of my bandmates ever fucking again.”

  He tapped too hard and opened a crack in the well between thumb and forefinger. A little powdered sugar fell into said crack. It looked like lime in a fresh grave. Run Lola Run smiled at him, then walked outside and lit a cigarette.

  “What,” read question number three, “do you most value in friends?”

  He typed away, as hard as he could, in the hope of waking the sleeping bandmates above him, in the hope of robbing them of their peace. His hands burned, and the cracks running across his
life line and heart line opened wide.

  “Friends?” he replied. “I value that they don’t completely laugh in your face when you return from a long journey, with little money to your name, your pride a memory, and your soul ripped to fucking shreds.”

  The computer wobbled under the rickety Old World table.

  “How about you, Rachel?” he typed. “How about you, Proust?”

  He took a breath. Maybe he should stop. Maybe he should go for a walk.

  One more question, he thought. I can handle one more.

  “What,” the screen asked, “is your idea of earthly happiness?”

  And that question kind of killed him. The answer, even a year ago, would have been that this life is my idea of total happiness: on tour, free of the shackles of middle-class expectation, just me and my boys, screaming down the highway to hell, on through the night, just another moonlight mile down the road. The answer would have been set in a clarion call, for once they were righteous soldiers of the cause, purveyors of the swindle, ready to engage in battles cultural, social, and economic, whatever it took to sing the rock-and-roll body electric. The answer would have been two words. The answer would have been Blood Orphans.

  But now the answer was a giant sucking sound. Happiness? Happee-ness?

  He forehanded the keyboard like a tennis pro, and it crashed to the floor.

  Patrons looked up from their coffee and papers. Ullee came out of the kitchen. His dreads seemed thinner. He looked at Bobby like he’d taken a shit in his café.

  “Whoops,” Bobby said. “Sorry?”

  “I think you should leave now,” Ullee said. “I think you ought to go.”

  “You do, huh?”

  “Now, man,” he said, and cursed in Dutch. “Now.”

  The keyboard lay there, bent and twisted, torn and frayed.

  “Now!” Ullee yelled. “Go!”

  Bobby put on his jacket and stomped out into the Dutch mist. The old buildings looked down on him with their cockeyed dormer windows. Fog blotted out their roofs.

  “Good job, dude,” he said. “Could you be a bigger asshole?”

  Run Lola Run stood there with her cigarette. Her legs, Bobby thought, looked like a fishnet ladder to a hot Dutch heaven, one that, with these ragged hands, he could never climb. Another beauty out of reach. Another sexy sprite who would fall into the arms of undeserving men. Men who never knew regret, never thought twice, and never looked back.

  She flicked her cigarette into the street and bounced on her heels.

  “Hey, rock star,” she said. “How’s it going?”

  2

  JUST ONCE, Joey thought, they could appreciate me. Just once, they could call her up and say, Hey, Joey, we know it must be tough wiping the spit of humiliation off your face each and every day, but we just want you to know we never forget how hard you work for us, how tirelessly you advocate our interests, how completely you sacrifice everything else to make sure we’re happy. Just once, she could call them and not get insulted with nicknames: Nazgûl, the Crippled Crone, Amphetamine Annie. She had a proper name and it wouldn’t kill them to use it once in a while.

  They had no idea what it was like to be the ambassador and evangelist of the biggest joke in the music business, the defender of terminally damaged goods, the sunny shepherd of the walking dead.

  Of course, calling Bobby had been a mistake. She had no love for Bobby. Bobby was hard to love, always fretting like the rabbit in Wonderland. It wouldn’t have done her any good to have him sitting here, scratching his hands. Generally, your enemy’s enemy was your friend. But with Bobby she’d rather take on failure all by her fucking self.

  Failure was going to show up any minute now at this sidewalk café, in the form of John Hackney, their European A&R guy, who, back in ancient history, had the task of assuring the success of Blood Orphans on the continent. Hackney, whom Joey had made the mistake of contacting before her trip, just to see if he could get some press to these final shows, only to find out that he would be in Amsterdam too, on unrelated matters.

  “We need to get together,” Hackney said. “We have to talk.”

  Very fucking funny.

  Her trip had been an act of desperation. She’d gone stir crazy at the world headquarters of DreamDare, her management company with an employee roster of exactly one, that ridiculous office on Wilshire and Westwood she rented to show what a budding Brian Epsteinette she was, a low-ceilinged, dusty room full of unopened boxes and a phone that rang only with complaints from creditors, a quiet place where she sat at a desk doing crossword puzzles and checking her e-mail while in the offices around her, boutique offshoots of the movie business — editing and animation and postproduction — hummed and thrummed. Out of boredom, she’d forced herself on all these adjacent people, hanging out until they had to ask her, Uh, Joey, don’t you have work to do? ’Cause we do. And she would say, Oh, of course, what time is it oh shit I have a meeting over at Capitol, I have lunch with an agent over at ICM, I have to meet with the accountant and figure out what to do with all this revenue. I just can’t count it fast enough!

  Upon which she would go back to her office and cry.

  So she decided to cross the pond and see what the four stooges had been up to, witness the end of an era, make a clean break with that which had brought her almost-fame and several hundred thousand dollars that she’d frittered away on expensive dinners, rebuilt hot rods, and sky-high office rent. She wanted to see her blessed band’s last show, even though seeing them now, at the tight end of the career noose, would do little more than fill her with any number of different angers: at the band, at herself, at the record company. But anger on a first-class transatlantic flight was a fuck of a lot better than watching sunlight move across the Hollywood sign from your window, waiting for someone who wasn’t a collection agency to return your phone calls.

  Not that she knew anything about running a company, or even going to work. When Joey was seventeen, an old man had driven up onto a Santa Monica sidewalk and plowed right into her. The accident provided her with two things: a settlement that meant a decade’s worth of financial security and a bum left leg with a nasty limp. At first she’d alleviated the pain with prescription painkillers, but then she put her purple Camaro into a guardrail while loaded on Vicodin and malt liquor. Now she just hauled around an infirmary-sized bottle of Tylenol, and a well-hidden bindle of coke.

  You could get anything on a plane if you stuck it far enough up your ass.

  In her wildest nightmares, Joey had never imagined that Blood Orphans would fail so completely. There had been Darlo and Bobby’s night in the Omaha jail, and the riot in Stockholm. There had been Bobby’s tooth loss and hand decay, and Shane’s descent into comically condescending religiosity, and Adam’s annoying art-school philosophies, his crushed velvet, his Fu Manchu.

  But that was just rock and roll. The real problem, the quandary that turned folly into failure, was one very small number: 3,451. The number of copies of Rocket Heart sold. Figuring out who was responsible for that number would take the rest of her life.

  The breeze picked up, spun leaves on Dam Square. She lit a cigarette and felt some postnasal drip. Eau de Cocaine slid down her throat.

  “Nice day,” she said, smiling, as if she were on a date.

  Conventional wisdom said that Blood Orphans had set themselves up by taking that advance. No one wanted to like a band that hadn’t earned it. Everyone from radio promoters to fellow bands to hipster blog bullshit artists looked upon them as some rogue element, as if their big record deal had forever polluted the workings of a pure and untainted pop music ecosystem.

  But none of that would’ve mattered if Spin hadn’t gone after them. Spin’s hatchet job rendered them stillborn. The editor, some butch British fuck named Arthur St. George, took it upon himself to turn his review of Rocket Heart into an editorial on the evils of irresponsible rock-star life and made this screed the Editor’s Note, right under a picture of him looking smarmy at his desk i
n skyscraperland.

  “You’ve no doubt heard about Blood Orphans,” St. George wrote, “the foursome from Silver Lake that went from unknown in their hometown to a multimillion-dollar act for Warners. Bully for them. We root for the lucky. It’s what makes rock and roll great. Still, it’s no surprise that their record, Rocket Heart, is terrible. Just flat-out criminally terrible, a hodgepodge of old Kiss riffs, vocals that make David Coverdale look like Placido Domingo, and guitar pyrotechnics so lame Steve Vai could do better with a ukulele. That’s not surprising. What is surprising is that Warner Bros., proud home to generations of musical legends, has signed a bunch of racists. Yes, that’s right. Blood Orphans are racist. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before — I know, it’s only rock and roll — but ‘Double Mocha Lattay’ makes ‘Brown Sugar’ look like an appeal for tolerance. The track features lines like ‘Once you go black, you’ll never go slack’ and ‘Sweet little white boy, you’re the best don’t you know/buy me a mink fur coat and I’m your personal ho.’ Another example of this idiocy can be found in track three, ‘I Also Have a Dream,’ with the lines ‘I just want a cock as big as MLK/So I can walk down the street and yell, Ladies, this way!’ And finally there’s ‘Ultra-Apache’: ‘She was a squaw so fine, I loved to grind her gears/full lips, brown skin, and a trail of fucking tears.’ Blood Orphans deserve a fast burial in an unmarked grave, the entire print run of Rocket Heart burned in a fire of purification. Shame on you, Warner Bros. Shame on you.”

  Within a week Warners had recalled the record and released another, in a vastly smaller print run, without the three offending songs. One hundred thousand discs and one hundred thousand inner sleeves into the shredder. Darlo, author of said lyrics, refused to apologize, make a statement, stage a benefit for the NAACP.

  “These lyrics are a joke,” he said through their new, smaller, cheaper publicist. “It’s rock and roll, everyone. Besides, I’m one eighth full-blooded Cherokee. I know how racism feels. Lighten up!”

  The label withdrew the offer for them to spend two months opening for Aerosmith, and suddenly Steadman, their domestic A&R man, could not be reached for comment. Steadman, who had listened to every one of the offending songs over and over and never made a peep of protest, who liked to party with them like it was 1999, was always out, gone for the day, or had just stepped into a meeting.