“No,” Adam said. “I just wanted to see if anything in the book matches up with anything that Shane says.”
“Does it?”
“Not yet.”
Adam smiled at her in that annoying heartfelt way. The guy had a sincere streak five miles wide. But Joey knew she shouldn’t be sitting in judgment of anyone, and after all, that syrupy look felt kind of nice. No one else in the band was going to give her that look, especially with the bad news from Hackney. She wondered where in Amsterdam she could buy body armor.
“I went into the Grasshopper,” Joey said. “Have you been there?”
“For about ten minutes. Such a bummer. Like an opium den. Tour is already depressing enough.”
“Well, it’s almost over.”
Adam nodded solemnly as they shuffled forward. “I’ve been waiting months for touring to end, but now I really don’t know what to feel. It’s weird that we’re going to be in limbo, you know?”
“Roger that,” Joey said, but of course they weren’t going to be in limbo. One show was all that stood between Blood Orphans and the dustbin of rock-and-roll history.
“Darlo completely humiliated me onstage last night,” Adam said as they filed in. “It’s the last time.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“This time I mean it.”
“You mean what?”
Adam said nothing, took out his wallet.
“That’s what I thought,” Joey said. “Don’t worry, I’ll get it.”
The Van Gogh was packed with happy faces: the American upper-middle-class tourists with their new REI-approved hooded winter parkas; the hostelers with their water-resistant Thinsulate anoraks; the young Dutch couples arm-in-arm; the shutter-happy Japanese traveling in packs. But there wasn’t an ounce of happiness, Joey thought, in the work before them. MC Van Gogh sure had rocked the most miserable of painterly mikes.
Joey had minored in art history at UCLA, and she thought about painters in rock music comparisons. Monet was straight-up Lovin’ Spoonful. Mondrian was Kraftwerk with strings. Canaletto was two parts Beatles and one part ELO. But Van Gogh was his own thing.
“You’re really hobbling,” Adam said. “You OK?”
“I’m fine,” she said, and tasted lipstick. “Don’t bring it up.”
They stopped in front of
The Cottage.
A little rural house, the sun going down, a fire within through the stone window. Rough filters.
“I love this one,” Adam said. “I wrote a paper on it in art school. It was like a creative writing/art crit course, where we took paintings and extrapolated on what we thought the story was. I said that it was the house of a local murderer, a nineteenth-century serial killer.”
Joey scanned the crowd for hotties. Slim pickins.
“Where did you get
that
theory from?” she asked.
“It’s so sinister. Look at the wet olive tones and the burnt orange.”
Joey picked a cocaine crumb from her nose. “What, now olive and orange are symbols of death?”
Adam looked exasperated; she wasn’t playing her part. “No,” he said. “Jesus, Joey.”
“You’re not explaining it very well.”
“Well, quit being so literal. Just
look
at it, for fuck’s sake.” He stuck his hands out and made a scrunchy motion. “Just feel it.”
Joey stuck her hands out the same way. They looked like two people poking through an invisible pound of raw hamburger.
“Feel it?” Adam said. “Murder on the menu.”
“Hmm,” Joey said, and crossed her arms. “Do you think Van Gogh had a big cock?”
Adam looked down, exhausted.
“I should have been an art critic,” she said. “I should have followed my bliss. I could have been the art critic who writes about imagined artist cocks. Could have written a whole fucking book about it. I’d call it
The Angle of the Dangle.
An awesome muh-fugging title. Don’t you think?”
“Quit mocking me,” Adam said.
She still had that cocaine crust on her finger. It almost constituted a bump. She wiped the residue on her skirt. “Do you think I was a good manager, Adam?”
“A good manager?”
“Just check your reticence at the door and answer the question.”
Adam stuck out his lower lip. They had moved on to a series of paintings of flowers. “I think you did the best you could. I mean, I’m so wiped out it’s hard to say. Maybe in a week I could tell you.”
She squinted. “A week.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a complicated question.”
She looked deep into his eyes. He wasn’t kidding.
“Just say yes or no. Just go with your gut.”
Adam looked as if he suddenly had to take a raging piss. “I just don’t know, Joey.” He tried to move, but Joey grabbed him.
“Say yes or no,” she said. “Don’t write a letter. Don’t consult your genie in a bottle. Don’t call your mommy for advice. Just tell me what you fucking think.”
“Adam?”
A slight, beautiful hipster boy in the eighties-revival style emerged from the crowd.
“Oh, hey,” Adam said. “How are you? This is Joey, our manager.”
The boy introduced himself as Charlie Darling. He had photographed the band for British
Vogue.
For the shoot they had frolicked in the topiary of some thousand-year-old English manor dressed up like dukes, all Adam Ant–like. Charlie caught them in midair poses à la
Hard Day’s Night.
After, they had all done ecstasy. Bobby and Charlie Darling had made out behind the stables.
“Wow,” Joey said. “Bobby, huh?”
“Indeed,” Charlie said, playing with his headband. “And how is Bobby? Boy with the thorn in his side, eh?”
“In his hands, maybe,” Adam said. “What brings you to Amsterdam?”
“Long weekend of sexcapades,” he said. “You can’t beat this town for hobbying, and the price is where it’s at. But how have things
been?
”
“Terrible,” Joey said. “We’ve been abandoned by our label.”
Adam looked at Joey like, What the fuck is wrong with you? He actually looked disgusted. This improved Joey’s mood a hundred percent.
“Oh yeah,” she continued, “we’ve been fucked three ways until Wednesday by Warners. Left out to dry. Screwed, blewed, and tattooed.”
“Uh-huh,” Charlie said, because no one ever said stuff like that. You always kept up a bullshit front. You always acted like you’d just been asked to headline the Super Bowl. “Sorry to hear that. Such a good band.”
“You’re not sorry,” Joey said, disgusted with Charlie, a real Captain Disingenuous. “You probably think it’s funny. You’re probably just as fake and backstabbing as the —”
“
Shut up,
” Adam said.
Ah, fuck it, Joey thought. This was sweet, being able to speak her mind. But wait, she had always spoken her mind. That was the problem.
“I’m so sorry about the way things have gone,” Charlie said. “Hopefully things will improve.”
“Doubt it, Charlie,” she said. “Nothing personal. I’m sorry. But fuck you and fuck British
Vogue
and fucking fuck all of you.”
She winked at Adam, whose mustache had withered completely.
“See you outside?” she asked, and tried to skip away. But her bad leg wasn’t doing so hot, so she hobbled off, clutching herself, moaning in pain.
THEY’D BEEN HAVING
such a nice time, Adam thought, and then Joey had exploded all over the fey photographer. Which made him think that maybe they hadn’t been having such a nice time, that in fact Joey had been acting strange since the moment she appeared in line, dim-eyed, beer-breathed, and limping, carrying a vibe that said, It’s over. Curtains.
Sayonara. Auf Wiedersehen,
Blood Orphans.
Joey, he knew, was a good soul; she may not really have known what she was doing, but if nothing else, she was a buffer zone between Darlo and the universe. Their only trouble-free tour had been the one she’d been along for; Darlo hadn’t gotten in a single fight, and Darlo could no more avoid fights than he could avoid semianonymous sex. The drummer’s feelings for Joey were hard to determine, but he sure as shit straightened up when she walked in the room.
Yes, they were having a gay old time, there in the Van Gogh, until Joey started going on about whether or not Adam thought she was a good manager. Got right up in his face, so that Adam saw the network of lines around her eyes, lines that ran down her cheek so she looked old, as if she’d smoked too many cigarettes and had lost the elastin in her face. He could see the process of decomposition starting to happen underneath the smooth Sephora sheen, like in a horror movie where the young, beautiful girl is revealed to be three hundred years old, and a bloodsucker.
“See you outside?” she had said, and scampered off like Quasimodo.
Adam found her out front, talking on the phone with Darlo. Joey hung up, smiling. “Darlo’s got his panties up in a bunch. Something with his dad.”
“Hope it’s not too bad.”
“I hope it’s bad.” She smiled tightly, cigarette smoke enveloping her. “The guy’s a fucking scumbag. I told Darlo from the day I met him that he needed to distance himself from the old slime-stain. And did he listen? No. God forbid he should listen to me.”
“You’re the
only
one he listens to.”
Joey looked at him, disbelieving, smoke shrouding her face. “That’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?” Adam’s eyes went sharp. “You know what’s up.”
Adam watched confusion settle in Joey’s eyes. She looked around as if she stood in a cage, trying to find the lock.
“These bike riders are crazy,” she said. “I almost got hit too many times to count. Vast armies of them. Battalions of them. Or would that be batallia?”
She kept looking around, frantic to change the subject.
“You’re not a bad manager, Joey,” he said. “You’re a great manager. There’s the answer to your question.”
Her eyes came to rest. She brushed off her suit jacket. She even managed to look a little bashful.
“Thanks, Adam. Your lie is most appreciated.” She squeezed his shoulder. “The whole fucking time this band has been together, you’ve been playing Gandhi. Maybe it’s the best approach to all the bullshit.”
“It isn’t.” He unlocked his bike. “I can promise you that.”
She leaned on the bike rack, pulled her aviators from her hair, and put them on. “Anyway, this will all be over soon, which you probably know better than the others because you’re not all fucked up, you’re still the same person, no better or worse than you were when you were playing in Angel’s Sweat, and I hope in your post–Blood Orphans existence that you stop being the one everyone laughs at. The long-suffering martyr act didn’t serve you well in this band, and it won’t serve you well in life.”
Adam nodded, and thought,
Joey, poor Joey.
But behind those words, he smarted.
“I say this,” she said, wincing on her bad leg, “because I care about you, and Darlo, and even Shane, though I shouldn’t.”
“What about Bobby?”
Joey dropped her empty Players box. “Bobby sucks. I fucking hate Bobby. Little Darlo suck-up.”
“He’s all right.”
“Is he?” She stamped on the box again and again. “No one with hands like that is
all right.
I wish I could fire Bobby and fix the whole problem. But that would be too easy.”
Now the box was impaled on her heel. She shook her foot, but it wouldn’t come off, hanging there like a little baby trash panda. Adam remembered when he’d met Joey, in the booker’s office at Spaceland. She’d been such a laser beam then, a hot little Colossus striding across the LA scene, her tight mohawk most fashionable, with glitter makeup shading her eyes and her red-stained diamond ring shining despite the dim backstage light. Back then, Adam had truly felt like he’d wandered into some culturally Promethean moment; she’d had some kind of aura to her. She just fully believed every fucking word she said, and that was enough to spin a spell. Now she stood in a stained suit on a windy corner, one hand gripping his arm, as she snagged the cardboard off her stiletto heel.
“
Got it,
” she said, as hair fell into her eyes.
DARLO RARELY EXPERIENCED DOUBT
. Doubt appeared only when he drove his M3 just a little too fast on the downward curves of Laurel Drive, or when Shane stumbled around onstage, babbling about Buddha, unable to catch the beginning of a verse, or when he was riding some almost nameless trick too hard and thought he’d blow his wad too soon. But now doubt crawled up his dirty pant leg and seized his balls. His balls, normally so big and burnished, experienced a sense of entrapment. Doubt shrank them down, filling him with a lightheaded sense of foreboding.
Tax evasion. The all-purpose proxy charge. The prosecutorial straw man. And no access to his money. All tied up.
What the fuck.
His dad, in dulcet tones of nonchalance, made it sound like getting arrested was a common nuisance that you had to deal with year in and year out. But the old man had never been arrested; investigated, yes, for almost the entirety of his career, but never served and cuffed. Back in the eighties, the Meese Commission had a hard-on for David Cox. They’d bugged his house, and all they’d heard was a bunch of rutting. But arrested? Arrested had to mean that the problem had scaled above the heads of the legal teams his dad retained for First Amendment rights, racketeering, and employment discrimination. Had to mean surveillance and dots connected. Had to mean the lawyers hadn’t seen it coming.
How could this fucking happen?
A commotion to his left. Music, amplified in watery echoes and tinny accents. A kind of tiny riverboat, à la Mark Twain, moved up the canal, full of reveling blond people and a Dutch Dixieland band marching in place on a little stage. Darlo grimaced; Dixieland music always gave him the creeps, ever since he saw
Live and Let Die
as a kid, that opening scene where the marching band stops its parade to become a hit squad. Gave him nightmares for months.
That grimace turned to anger, because the scene also reminded him of yet another one of Joey’s great ideas gone amok, a publicity stunt that even Warners thought was of dubious worth but what the fuck, we just gave them seven figures, might as well try everything. Let’s get a flatbed truck, load it up with a wall of amps and some of America’s next top models, put the band in feather boas and leather, and drive it up Fifth Avenue in the middle of the day. It was a trick that the Rolling Stones did back in nineteen seventy-whatever, so that means it has to be a good idea, right? We’ll make a little backdrop, a plywood wall with
Rocket Heart
posters, and the models will rub up on the band, and they’ll take rush hour hostage. What a photo op, huh?