Rock Bottom (31 page)

After he got the lead out, he would get back to logistics and plans, call Jesse and get an update, call McFadden and give him some hard truth about his dad, and then he really ought to call the cops. Right? He wavered on the notion of being such a full-on Judas.

“I’m not him,” he said. “Fuck him.”

But now he would show that little black-haired Winona-frau. He would present her with the Cox magic, the mad Darlo science, ride her hard and leave her wet and begging for more. He had the euros and could get whatever he wanted. Northern Euro girls, with their tight glottal moans, like they were choking on the smallest little bit of pride. He’d make her his little black-haired autobahn and take her curves real tight.

Without warning or provocation, he thought of Shane standing on some nameless stage, stuck in a ridiculous pose of rock god, trying to be Robert Plant and Perry Farrell, skinny chest out and stupid short white dreads sprouting from his head like eyes on a potato.

Why did his mind have to fucking go and ruin the moment?

There she was. In the pink window. He marched over.

“See you later,” he told Joey, who was standing in the street uncapping that flask of awful apple ripple she loved. “Thanks, babe.”

The girl in the window recognized him immediately and began shaking her head. He flashed his money and yelled out his contrition for all to see. The remnants of the loogie that he’d spit earlier were still congealed on the glass. She waved her finger, like, Not a chance. He waved the bills in the air furiously.

“Look, please, come on, how can you say no to this. Look!”

She spent a few moments thinking it over, then spoke through the glass. “Hold on, please,” she said, and disappeared through her black curtain.

Oh fuck, was he going to give it to her. The longer she held him back, the harder she was going to make it for herself. Shane’s pasty chest continued to block pleasing images from his mind’s eye. That fucking poser pussy. When he saw the singer later, he would lay down ultimata. Get rid of those ridiculous dreads or you’re fired. Not another mention of Buddhist Tantric Zen chickenshit or you can find another band on a major fucking label.

He turned and looked back for Joey, but she was gone.

“Huh,” he said as the girl opened the door. He bore his gaze into hers and put the cash in her hand. “I wasn’t kidding. There it is. So I can do whatever I want with you now.”

“American boy,” she said, looking at the money, “you’ll do what I tell you that you can do. Understand?”

Some spit almost fell from his mouth as he took in her milky breasts, soft, rolling hills in the northern dells of green-fielded, thatched-roof Holland.

“Because that’s how it’s done here,” she said. “Or we don’t play. You act nice. No second chances.”

“You got it, baby,” he said, closing the door. “Fucking sweet.”

She walked behind the curtain. The room smelled of cedar. Darlo’s stomach grumbled. A strobe light came on and he felt alone, back in the canyon, stepping on sharp sticks, crying out for that girl.

“All right,” he said. “Don’t keep me waiting, baby.”

She came out with a can of Coke. She smiled and cracked it open. “I love this stuff,” she said, took a gulp, set it down next to the bed. “Now take off your clothes, boy.”

“It’s Darlo.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“A stud’s name.”

She laughed, but not with him, and said something in Dutch. Darlo’s feet felt numb. “Take your clothes off, Darlo.”

“You first. I’m paying.”

She smiled and swept off her top, revealing small, rounded breasts and a thin silver chain hanging from her belly button. She sat on the bed, spread her legs, and rubbed herself.

“Your turn,” she said, speaking in monotone. “Show me that big American muscle.”

He took off his jacket and his T-shirt, showing the skinny, broad-shouldered, bare-chested figure that had always served him so well. A little bit of belly sat there, like a badly thought-out addition to a mansion. Then he dropped his pants. A minute before, his cock had raged against the inside of his leathers, harder than water from a copper mine. Now he was soft as a piece of
P
lay-Doh.

“What the fuck?” he said, pink walls closing in. “Wait a second.”

She rubbed at her pussy some more. Darlo tried to concentrate.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Stressed out about something?”

“No, I just …” He stared at his cock like they’d never met. “Just wait a minute.”

The strobe light powered over them. Some saxophone-ridden smoky jazz came out of the stereo.

She moved to the floor and crawled toward him, coming alive a little. “I can help, boy,” she said, and stuck out her tongue. “I can bring you my soft, sweet little mouth.” She stopped every few moments to bring her hand against her crotch, reaching in, bowing her head down. “So soft and wet. Wet,” she whispered, and her voice blended into the music. When the strobe hit her face, sweat appeared on her alabaster cheeks.

“Wet, boy. Stroke your cock, baby.”

He touched it and felt nothing. Her belly-button chain dangled.

“My mouth is soft and wet,” she said. “Stroke.”

She was almost below him, but Darlo wasn’t getting any harder. He was still thinking about that girl hiding in the canyon woods, blood running down her legs, the bramble cutting her up as she crouched, hid from the Cox Leatherman. Hid from Darlo’s cries of help.

She looked at me, Darlo thought, and saw him. She saw me through the brush and thought, It’s a trick. They’ll kill me.

“Baby, come on,” Ms. Pink said. “I’m getting closer, baby. Stroke that cock, big boy.”

The police would ransack the house, but they wouldn’t know the combination on the door to the dungeon. His dad wouldn’t tell them the combination and McFadden wouldn’t make him, so they wouldn’t find them in time. When they broke through, they would find bones and flesh. He would be the inheritor of all this death and suffering. Uncovering the Cox family plot, they would find rot and worms. He would be connected to this forever. How could he save them?

“Here is my mouth, baby,” she said, and her breath was on his crotch. She looked up at him with complete commitment. “Give me that cock.”

Staring down her throat was like staring down the stairs of his father’s snuff cave. Into the dark. Flickers of tonsils. Mouths without bodies. Mouths ripped apart. He was connected to this. He had installed the door. He had screwed in the bolt.

“Give it to me,” she said.

Deep in the dark of her mouth, girls tied up, hidden. Deep in the dark of her mouth, rotting bodies, sorrow and hurt. And him.

“Give it to me,” she said, the strobe over her mouth as if she were a pole dancer at the Peppermint Castle. “All the way down, baby. All the way down there.”

“No,” he said, and moved away. “No, shit, no.”

Somewhere down there. All of them. Bodies in pieces. Connected to him forever. He was soft. Her face was wet.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Are you all right?”

He fell to the floor. He crumpled up.

6

AN HOUR AFTER MEETING
Deena Freeze, Adam sat in the office of Fritz Mallgroom, from whom Blood Orphans rented all their equipment. He’d come from Morten’s with two guitars, a Les Paul and a Telecaster, that belonged to Fritz, in the hope that he could quickly drop them off and head to the bar of the Krasnapolsky. Adam thought it would be nice to have a drink on Joey’s tab before dinner. Fuck Joey, right? Everybody else says fuck Joey, so to speak, so why can’t I?

But nothing happened fast with stony Fritz, who was taking care of a band of skinny-tied emo fops named Praise Chorus. They were arguing with each other over the size of their amps, and Fritz refused to weigh in.

“Internal affairs,” he said. “Utterly, man.”

His office, at the end of the equipment catacombs, was overrun with instruments. Here, collecting dust and half covered with papers and exotic stringed instruments, were Hammond B-3s, Wurlitzers, a mellotron. On top of an Ashdown amp, two lutes balanced with a bag of apples. Fritz ate apples constantly so he wouldn’t smoke. Through the doorway, Praise Chorus argued on and on while Fritz, in his leonine shag, Golden Delicious in hand, sat serenely on a Marshall cab.

“That Marshall Fritz is sitting on is too big, dude!”

“Well, it’s the only thing that can counter your Vox!”

“We just can’t fit it in the van unless James gets a smaller set of drums.”

“Fuck that, dude. Why am I always the one who has to sacrifice?”

The first time Blood Orphans rented from Fritz, they spent all afternoon pulling this prima donna shit. Fritz’s slow, contemplative ways had driven Darlo insane; every time the drummer raised his voice, Fritz shushed him. “Quiet,” he said, as if a giant slept next door. “Must keep it quiet, man.”

“But why can’t I have that old Gretsch?” Darlo said, pointing at a burnished gold set on the shelf that looked good as new. “You have to give me a reason.”

“Too much noise,” Fritz said, and bit into the crunchiest apple ever. “So loud somewhere. Can you hear it?”

The others loved watching Fritz gibberish Darlo into submission.

Fritz was a Christian man, which endeared Shane to him. Upon his desk lay a rosary wrapped around an old silver clock. Next to that was a portrait of his two hot blond daughters dressed as Santa’s elves on a ski slope, their feet bound up in Rossignols. Next to that was a signed portrait of Jimmy Page.

Adam went into the bathroom, hidden behind keyboard cases. He washed his face and looked in the mirror. A large scratch, as if from a dog, bisected his left cheek. His right eye had puffed and was almost black. Caked blood nested under a few fingernails.

He remembered the feel of hard ground and the huge weight on his arms when the Nazi pinned him. The boy had had nostrils that flared up like a bull’s. Adam wondered what had happened earlier to his attackers during the day, but figured that humanizing the assaulters would only lead down his default road of feeling bad for those who had fucked him.

When he emerged from the bathroom, Praise Chorus were loading their stuff into the freight elevator and Fritz was sitting cross-legged on a Marshall cabinet in his vest — brocade and silk, Fritz’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat — eating another apple, silver cross hovering above his New Age Christian bling.

One of the kids came back and practically begged Fritz for the lime-green Danelectro hanging with the other very fine guitars, between a gold-top Les Paul and a brown Gretsch Country Gentleman.

“Next time,” Fritz said. “Next time when you’ve brought everything else back. Can’t just lend out any old thing, no?”

The kid looked about fifteen, but he had a fire in his eyes. “I’ll have our manager wire collateral,” the boy said. “Please.”

Fritz crossed his legs tighter and chomped the apple. “You must earn trust from a man, you know. Trust is like a glue that creates calm between men. That is the only way.”

The kid nodded, confused, and retreated into the elevator. The back of his leather jacket had a cross on it, with the words
Solidarity and Faith
in florid lettering rainbowed over the top.

Fritz uncurled from the amp. The guy could shrink and expand at will, like a real superhero. His kingly mane was suspended above his head like a crown.

“Ah, Adam,” he said. “Finally the little kiddies are gone.”

“I’m not much older than them,” the guitar player said.

“Ah, but you are.” He lit a clove cigarette, sickly sweet. The smell of a million Goth dreams floated up to the vaulted ceiling. “They are just on their first time out, I think. You have braved the wilds. You are a logger of miles in the van. Age is immaterial, man, not a measurement of anything.” He plunked down in his leather chair and touched the picture of his daughters skiing as if lighting a devotional candle. “So, what of Blood Orphans? How is Shane?”

“Tired. We’re all tired. Shane is into Buddhism now. I don’t know. We don’t really get along.”

“Shane is a seeker.”

“That’s what he says.”

“I am quoting him,” Fritz said, and smiled. “He cornered me by the bass amplifiers and asked me about my journey. He is a seeker, though, that is true. I am not sure what he will find. He is a ragtag boy of many colors.”

Adam had no idea what that meant, but it sounded nice. The man’s voice was a lullaby.

“And what of Darlo, sad Darlo? When will he come back with half of what he borrowed?” He crunched his apple. “When do you think his reckoning will come?”

“Probably never. Nothing bad could happen to him.”

“Don’t believe it,” Fritz said. “Not … a word. For so much bad has already happened. Listen. He is telling you.”

Fritz motioned to a stack of CDs on his desk, and there, in between Pavement and Evanescence, lay
Rocket Heart.
Adam put it in the boom box.

“Darlo is not the boy-king that you perceive,” he said. “He is the one confounded in pain. Wrapped up in a stasis of suffering.”

Rocket Heart
’s lead-off track, “Beretta-Couda,” began, with a stomping rhythm not unlike half of the AC/DC catalogue. It was the second song Darlo and Adam had written in the basement rec room of the Cox mansion, sitting on the pool table and drinking Buds. The thousand-dollar-a-day sound of Paradise exploded through the tinny old Sony speakers.

She’s got a love-stunner gun-tail move like a shark.

I love her and I hate her but she keeps me in the dark.

I swim along her reef to try to find the hidden treasure,

But my bones break on her rocks. When will I get her

  secret pleasure?

Insert roaring guitar solo to punctuate said waterbound frustration. Insert Adam, finding his way through Darlo’s inability to put his sexual frustration to words, trying to perform a solo that approximated the metaphor of woman-as-ocean, vast tidebound taunting.

“Darlo loves that song,” Adam said over the din. “He says it’s the closest he’s ever come to putting his sex addiction down on paper.”

Fritz crunched his apple and bobbed his head along, shaking blond hair loose, and unveiled a red bong from behind some keyboards. At the base, in some kind of tropical font, were the words
Happy Notions.