“He’s a nice man,” Bobby said. “That was shitty of me.”
“He’s a perv,” she said. “He stares at my tits. Those computers are shit. And his dreads — nasty.”
Bobby started picking at the stitching too, bringing his hand closer and closer to hers, moving among oak trees and Bambis, woodchucks and daisies.
“And then I came stumbling out,” he said. “A mess.”
Their fingers touched, took apart a seam.
“And there you were,” she said. “And here we are.”
She dimmed the lights. Stars covered her ceiling, glow-in-the-dark constellations. She rolled over him softly, throwing off her shirt, and as her shadow grew on the wall, he thought of Roy Batty, the replicant played by Rutger Hauer in
Blade Runner,
and the soliloquy he gives in the moments before his death.
Her tongue was hot and slick. His hands went all over her. She didn’t care about their condition.
“Press lightly,” she said. “Slow and light now, Bobby.”
At the end of
Blade Runner,
Batty stands on the top of a building, having just saved the life of Deckard, the man hunting him down, played with a most potent dude-itude by Harrison Ford. Batty’s quest to stay alive, to escape the internal robotic clock that marks him for imminent expiration, is over. Atop the rain-soaked roof of some rotting art deco building, the lights of dystopian progress sputter in their vision. Handfuls of vapor sheet down their faces. Batty rises over Deckard, who looks up in terror and wonder. He rises over him, as thunder and lightning spit sound and light. He rises over him, mountain-sized.
“I have seen things,” Batty says, “you people would not believe.”
He understands that he cannot fight against the predestined, understands certain inevitabilities, finally, completely.
“Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,” he continues. “I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.”
Sarah removed his shirt, ran her hands along Bobby’s spotty-haired chest, got on top and pinned him down. The replicant’s face loomed in his sight. But the replicant was him, come to rest once and for all.
“All those moments,” Batty whispers, “will be lost in time. Like tears in rain.”
In Bobby’s eyes, the room dropped away in the tunnel vision of desire and flight. Sarah was a burning little star, dwarfing the Milky Way behind her, moving, unhurried, in the dimmed-down gloaming.
“Lost,” Batty says, lowering his eyes. “Like tears. In rain.”
But still, streaming over her henna-red head like a halo, Bobby saw the Big Dipper, and the spindly necklace of Cassiopeia, and, poised like a little diamond earring, the North Star.
“Like tears,” he said, stretching to meet her. “In rain.”
She reared up. Had she heard him at all?
“You smell like vanilla,” she whispered. “What do I smell like?”
“Salt,” he said. “Water. Fire, baby. Fire.”
She laughed, and her teeth glinted, and further off, past her, lay oceans of stars, oceans that had lain upon so many ceilings, from all the vantage points, on skies painted in blue and white, oxblood and sea green. On beds in countless states and cities, foreign and domestic, these glow-in-the-dark constellations, these dioramas, couched him and the numerous burning feminine celestias that had hovered and crested and zoomed in his vision, creating points of bearing by which he navigated all the differences of escape. She and he, coasting and grooving, up into the night sky.
SOMETIMES THE BUDDHA HAD
a tough day. No problem. Shane was in rags, a fucking Untouchable, but some roles were worth the humiliation.
His ears were really ringing now. That Dutch bastard had popped him good. But it made the suffering more complete, richer, gave the experience more bragging rights.
He stood in Joey’s hotel room, a real nice spread, still a little bit stunned that she’d actually left their names at the front desk.
“Yes, Mr. Warner,” the petite suited punk-rock boy with the nose stud had said, and handed him a key. “Enjoy your stay.”
Shane grabbed the boy’s arm. “Is there a wet bar in the room?”
“Yes, sir,” the clerk said, in the blandest nonconfrontational monotone. “Please let go of me.”
And what a wet bar it was. Big-ass mother. Little gimp tramp.
Joey’s tan Vuitton suitcase lay next to the bed. Shane wondered where the rest of her luggage was — that bitch would take a suitcase to buy a pack of cigarettes — and pondered the worth of rifling through the contents. Who knew what he’d find, besides unsent love letters to Darlo. Next to the suitcase lay a box of thirty CDs, right from the printing plant. A Post-it note stuck to the box said
For Revvy at Guild Records.
Shane had no idea who Revvy or Guild Records was. He ripped open the box and grabbed a CD; their four faces in that Queen-wannabe pose, looking up from darkness.
“Wow,” he said, stroking the cover, like an old crone looking upon an image of her princess self. “
Man.
”
He regarded the opulence of Joey’s suite. If she cared at all about us, Shane thought, she would have gotten each of us a room. That would have been a nice thing, a generous thing, but the manager wasn’t nice or generous. She was a sewer rat, chewing away with her spiked rodent teeth at the bottom of their mighty rock-and-roll vessel, doing nothing while Darlo steered it right into the shoals of show-biz breakdown.
In the sparkling clean shower, dirt and peanut butter fell off him in a sheet, making a putty on the five-star porcelain. He pleasure-groaned until water ran into his right ear and imitated a ballpoint pen going jab-jab-jab. His knees buckled and he cried out, but he loved the pain too. Ear stigmata to the max. He steadied himself. Rode it out.
“And I have suffered,” he sang into the detachable brass showerhead, trying to croon like Sinatra, his only croon frame of reference. “Oh za-za-zoom I have suffered. Oh I hate Darlo, za-za-zoom, and I hate Bobby, ya-za-ba-za boom, thank you, New York, thank you so much. No, you’re much too kind, no, please, I don’t deserve it!”
Steam filled up the shower, reminding him of a certain moment in a shower in a hotel in Portland, where two Reed coeds had taken him on. He leaned against the wall, jerking off, and remembered the brunette’s shattered heart tattoo across her shoulder, and how he had gotten down on his knees and played the part of the sexual penitent as they offered soft, complex communion. He leaned against the wall and grew stiff as a board in the desert.
Then a jet of water blasted his ear. The pain this time left no room for reminiscence, bisected his head in a nonnegotiable agony, a sharp, burning lance straight through to his brain. His legs gave out and he fell to the floor. The position he assumed was similar to that of prostration at New Fundamentalist Baptist Church, Anaheim, the church where he’d tithed away his fortune, the holy house at which he’d been a once-and-future-king but where, now, if he entered in his peanut butter aura, he’d be immediately and forcefully ejected. But the position was also an evolutionary still life, of one headed out of, or back into, the silty tide pools of some Mesopotamian floodplain.
The agony, he knew, was guided by the invisible, all-powerful hand of God, malignant and devious, never showing its face, piercing and playing, halving and quartering. Shane coughed up water and pounded the tile floor in theological frustration.
“Why is this happening?” he said. “Why are You doing this to me? Why are You doing this? I have tried so fucking hard! I have looked for You everywhere!”
He leaned against the wall. The showerhead, high above him like the nourisher of all things, rained down. Water dripped from his lips.
“But where are You? You are nowhere. Show Your face to me.”
The pain delivered him no knowledge. Nothing from the wellspring but an empty echo of pitter-patter covering his tears. His ears settled back into a steady, numbing thump, and he looked up to the Teledyne altar. Water poured down like silver.
“Show Your face to me!”
He exited from the stall and donned a plush terrycloth robe that fell down to his ankles. But luxury, even this slight, went against his unshakeably shitty mood; within a minute he was out of the robe and back into his nasty clothes, which, sad smells and all, felt like part of his body, felt like armor. Certain things were indispensable in the seeker’s quest, but terrycloth was not one of them.
He tuned the TV to VH1 Europe, broke the seal on the wet bar, and mixed a bourbon and water. Ordered a cheeseburger from room service, because veganism suddenly seemed like a dumb thing when you had free meat at the snap of your fingers. Felt a hot hum in his crotch and marveled at the everpresence of sin in his heart.
Watching twilit Amsterdam from the window, he was filled with serenity as he used to be in church, when he would turn to his left and see his whole family there, dressed and buffed: his sister, Jane, his brother, Tom, both of them still in high school and showing little interest in rock and roll, or any form of self-expression; his mother, Catherine, happily born, bred, and set to die in Orange County; and his dad, the old engineer, whose intellectual curiosity was as narrow as Paris Hilton’s waistline. Shane stared down the pew and they looked at him, waiting for a cue.
“I should meditate,” he said. “I should be thankful.”
He assumed a poor man’s lotus position on the bed, put his palms up in the air like he was checking for rain, and closed his eyes, focusing his anxieties into a ball and sending them down the trash hole of his consciousness. But ear pain, pulsing and spiked, plugged the hole like a clump of rotting food and sent the anxieties back up at him.
His cell phone rang. The disgusting world called the seeker back.
“Fuck it,” he said, and opened his eyes.
A local number. What the fuck?
“Shane, it’s Danika. From last night.” She giggled. “Remember me?”
Remember me?
They always said that.
“What do you want?”
She kept giggling. She was in on all kinds of jokes he’d been left out of. “You’re funny, man.”
He said nothing. She breathed into the phone. His crotch kept humming. His ears rang like a starting bell.
Remember when you were earnest and sincere, Shane? Remember when you thought that callous was something you had on the heel of your foot?
“Your fucking dad attacked me,” he said. “He attacked me and banged up my ears. Did you know that?”
She laughed. “He’s not my dad. He’s my stepdad.”
“That explains a lot.”
“Sorry?”
Shane recalled the intimacy, however perverse, between stepfather and stepdaughter. Out the window, a crow took off from a tree. He poured a shot of Jack Daniel’s and took a manly slug.
“He’s a dick either way,” he said. “He came at me with two fucking garbage —”
“Hey, so are you going to put me on the guest list tonight?”
He took another slug but missed. Bourbon ran down his shirt. He said nothing.
“But come on!” Her voice grew heavy. “Come on, baby.”
He imagined all kinds of geometry, and physics, and most of all biology.
“OK,” she said. “See you tonight?”
He grunted.
“OK, see you later!”
He threw the phone to the floor, reflected on temptation, rubbed his temples. When he returned to Los Angeles, he was going to figure this out. He would separate the seeker from the horndog, even try to make his parents understand that he was still their prodigal son, even though he looked like their worst nightmare and no way was he going to go back to singing about Christ. But for now he was going to find that band from the lobby. He wanted to be around them, and that felt pathetic but fuck it, he could show them how it was done. He was a veteran and they were obviously green. No band was that happy unless they were green, or Aerosmith.
His cheeseburger came. The Dutch bellhop waited for a tip, so he signed over twenty euros. Fuck Joey. It was probably their money anyway. Managers made their living skimming cream off the top.
Though Shane enjoyed his cheeseburger, a heaviness in his mouth warned him of great wrath to come; so much unfamiliar animal protein in one day was bound to cause a hydrochloric shitstorm. The meat tasted fantastic, but across the wilds of gastrointestinal time, he felt the faint charge of acidic explosion. He had eaten, in five hours, more animal flesh than he’d had in the preceding two years. Some serious blowback was coming down the pike.
He chased it down with another shot of Jack, putting a sting on his throat. Was there any meal more rock and roll than burgers and whiskey?
“No,” he said, and some of the brown drool escaped from his mouth. The taste hit his brain like a sloppy wet kiss from a beautiful girl.
Rifling though Joey’s suitcase in search of money, he found a copy of
Hustler,
a half-used carton of Players, and a dime bag. Wrapped up in a bunch of panties lay a wad of twenties, from which he took two bills. He wrapped the rest up tight, trying to make it look like he’d never been there. Then he decided that Joey could go fuck herself and dumped the entire suitcase on the floor. A pack of cigarettes covered up a beaver shot like two sins trying to go clean. Damning his loss of control, he tried to put everything back the way it had been, but he only succeeded in unraveling the twenties from the panties. He grabbed a CD to give to that band he had met in the lobby. His ears hummed as if he lay underneath a Marshall stack. On VH1 Europe, Motley Crüe talked about their triumphant comeback from the wasteland of drugs and alcohol.
“I was dead for five minutes flat,” Nikki Sixx said. “Like, for real, man, absolutely dead. Flatline. Seriously!”
WALKING IN THE HEART
of the red-light district with Darlo, Joey watched the girls in their windows. They exerted a certain allure, all that impure skin promising absolution from tension, all those bodies without context. Though she wasn’t into pay-to-cum, she understood its power in the way she understood all the times people ordered Jägermeister; nasty shit could really blow your mind, but that didn’t mean you’d escape the consequences.