Darlo, zombiefied, didn’t seem to notice any of it. She couldn’t be sure how much of his semi-catatonia had to do with her rejection of his advances, but she had to bring him back.
Only one option lay before her. The logic of what she was about to do would reveal itself to her one day, maybe when they finally lay together.
“We need to get you laid,” she said. “Come on.”
Darlo perked up. “You sure?”
“Of course I am,” she said, nodding hard before she could change her mind. Her leg began to ache again. She dry-popped Tylenol. Darlo, suddenly and distressingly back from the grave, started looking for someone specific.
“She was, like, yea tall, and had a mass of black hair and full ruby lips. She was a real wet dream, and my credit card wouldn’t fucking go through.”
Joey couldn’t believe how fast the prospect of pussy turned the drummer into a shaggy dog. Hackney’s face loomed up at her, all her failure summarized in the sultry gaze of an English stranger.
Soccer hooligans were out in full force. “Glory, glory, Man United!” they sang, red in the face, happy as new millionaires.
“I think she was over here,” Darlo said, pointing at a few windows, getting warmer. “She had the hottest curves, fuckin’ A, man, yeah, over here, the hottest little piece. I hope her fucking heavy is out to dinner. What a prick!”
The drummer pointed at a girl in a candy-pink window. She looked just the way he described her and wore a color-coordinated negligee. She stared at Darlo in a hostile way, confirming their history. Her stare made Joey jealous. The drummer held out his palm.
“That’s her,” he said, tongue almost lolling. “Whatcha got?”
Joey removed a few hundred-euro notes from her pocket and handed them over.
“Here goes nothing,” she said. “That ought to take care of it.”
Darlo snatched the bills with a piratical giggle and skipped over to the prostitute’s door. Ms. Pink glared at him through the glass, and he waved the cash like a white flag.
“Hey, remember me?”
Candy Pink shook her head.
“No, look, I have money now! Look, I have money right here!”
Dutchies on their way home from work took in the scene, expressionless; no doubt they saw an American Puritan prostrating himself at the legal pussy altar every day. Two dark-skinned guys in peacoats, smoking outside a fry joint, noted the situation with a Turkish call of encouragement. Joey watched the broken son of the porn king beg at the feet of this little pink-emblazoned Dutch lady. She battled back her jealousy and took a mental photograph.
Candy Pink opened the door. The peacoated fellows clapped. Joey envied Darlo and his simple wants; all the drummer needed was some tail and he was all right. He could point at something in the physical world and see a solution. Joey’s satisfaction concerned slippery slopes of success, reputation, and power. You couldn’t grasp any of that in the palm of your hand. You could only piece together events and try to find a pattern. And the pattern for her was blind alleys, missed opportunities, possibilities squandered, a brand name that couldn’t buy respect, a bunch of bands that everyone ridiculed. And tonight she had to put the fucking franchise to rest. Tonight she had to preside at a dinner that would end as a total roasting, no matter who she put at either side of her.
The Sharpie Shakes jingle wafted up from a radio passing by. Its bone-crunching tones surrounded Joey in a vise grip. That fucking jingle. They’d be swimming in hard licensing cash. But she had talked them out of it.
Fun in the sun … you betcha … good times ahead … it’ll getcha!
The jingle faded down the street like Fischer-Price thunder. Darlo had disappeared into the brothel. They were supposed to be at the hotel for dinner in less than an hour. She lit a Players and pulled from her jacket pocket her nickel-plated Warner Bros. flask, swag of good times long gone. She’d promised herself she’d go to dinner sober, but that jingle, tracking her, haunting her, burning her, had tipped over what was left in the wet, cold barrel of her resolve. Resolve seeped out of her pores, ran down the street in rank rivulets.
She gulped her brandy. Applejack. She’d read somewhere that Ronnie Van Zant drank it constantly, strutted the stage aflame with it, wrote “Freebird” doused in it. So there had to be some magic in its bitter, chemical tones. She gulped again, blew smoke rings, and waited for his beautiful backcountry ghost to take her by the soul. When it did, she formulated one last, desperate gambit.
SHANE HEARD THE PARTY
from way on down the hall. Good thing; he couldn’t remember the room number that sucker of a drummer had told him in the lobby. The copy of
Rocket Heart
weighed down his jacket. He knocked on the door of the Rodin Suite.
A young woman dressed in impeccable turn-of-the-seventies cowgirl hippie chic answered the door. “Can I help you?”
Little groupie, out of my way. I am Shane James Warner of Blood Orphans. I am the recipient of dirty money and negative press. I have scoured the earth, always seeking truth and God. I can teach you a thing or two. I am a veteran of the scene. I am a valuable resource.
“What’s that smell?” she said. “Oh, man!”
A chill went through him. He took a whiff. She was right. Why did he still smell like rotting peanut butter?
The members of the band looked up from their couches, their sterling mirrors, their fashion magazines. They looked up from their fantasyland and saw the Ghost of Christmas Past. Shane might as well have been wearing chains and moaning. Parts of him might as well have been falling off.
They pointed at him, exultant.
“Hey, Dave, get out here! It’s Peanut Butter Bob!”
“PB and J!”
“Peanut fucking Butter Bob! Man, what’s up!”
The drummer came out of the bathroom, zipping up. When he saw Shane he began to apologize. “I didn’t really think he’d come up here, I swear, I just —”
But they waved him off.
“Forget about it, Dave, all the freaks want to get to know you. Well, shit, PB and J, Dave said you smelled like peanut butter and damn if he wasn’t right, but have a fucking seat, take a motherfucking load off, we got too much good shit anyway, why be a hoarder? Why bogart all the goodness? Nay, we shall not! Nay, we shall smote our hoardage with equal and opposite kindness! A seat, smelly PB and J, take a seat!”
Shane sat down at the fortress of white leather couches arranged in a square around the big glass table, which was littered with drug paraphernalia, cans of Heineken, and several bindles of coke. What would the Buddha say? Is all of this yin or is it yang? Stick or serpent? Heaven or hell?
A girl emerged from the bathroom right behind the drummer, wiping her mouth.
“Dave’s got a monster load in that little thing!” she said, and they laughed.
“Even the drummer gets laid in this band!” yelled the guy who was certainly not the bass player; he had a shine on him that said, I stand at the front of the stage every fucking night. My crotch stares down young girls. I am a made man. “Are we not charitable? Are we not kind? Does Virgin Records not so completely own our ass? Are we not utter happy whores? Does Warner/Chappell not so completely own Ron’s songs?”
Ron came up from the cocaine like a wave cresting. Taller than the others, with broad shoulders and big muttonchops framing his full lips, he appeared to be the natural leader of the group.
“I am
so
owned, dudes.” He put his mouth on the cleavage of a young lady who wore red suede pants and had a bit of a roving eye. Then he grabbed both her tits and cradled them while she protested too much, falling into giggles and play slaps.
“Oh, yes, oh my God, yes.” He laughed. “I am so owned. These are the fruits of my bounty. I am a whore in Babylon.”
“No, Ron,” she said, thick eyebrows and all. “
I
am the whore of Babylon.”
“Damn your eyes!” Ron said, apparently to himself.
Another guy, whose mottled skin belied his happy vibe, laughed so hard he fell to the floor, coughing.
Shane knew this scene, remembered the room at the Chateau Marmont they’d wrecked after their CD release show at the Wiltern, mayhem and bedlam and ahem, pass the cocaine. But even at the time Shane knew he’d been trying too hard, been too tense about it, as if someone were filming the destruction. Here in the Rodin Suite, the vibe was somehow mellow. There was no sense, even in the ribbing they gave Dave the drummer, that they meant any harm or gave two shits about how it all looked; he just sat there enjoying himself, having accepted his lot, like Ringo in
A Hard Day’s Night.
Shane liked that movie. Ringo was the jester and he took some shit from the other three, but you could tell they loved him. Even Paul, that smarmy little bitch. Why did everyone say to Shane that if they were the Beatles, Shane would be Paul? How come Adam got to be George? Shane was the spiritual one, goddamnit. He was the seeker. Adam wasn’t spiritual. It wasn’t fucking fair.
“Do a line, Peanut Butter Nutter Fucker,” Ron said, pushing the small mirror at him. “Give it a go, Holmes.”
“Much obliged,” Shane said, and bore down on it like a champ.
“Hoover!”
The sting in his ears pulled against the sting in his nose, which pulled against the cheers from the room.
“Hoover-on-o-mous Bosch! He’s an artist!”
The sting pulled him three ways until Wednesday, pulled him taut and turned him into an electric amphetamine Bermuda Triangle.
“Hoover mover and shaker!”
A slap on his back. Congratulatory cheers.
“Peanut Butter equals Hoover! Hoover-a-lanimous! Born in Hoovlakhastan!”
He recognized that they had all kinds of sayings and codes. Blood Orphans had no codes, no secret handshakes, no winks, no shared anything. Except bitterness.
He hit another line before they could stop him.
“Lord have mercy! Good God, will someone testify for the Hoover Man!”
Down there, riding that white rail, he saw the record cover. Four faces alone, staring away from each other. Four faces, zero friendship. Created just for the joke of Mammon. Created for a deadly sin. Staring up to the ground, to the earth. Down in limbo. Four faces in a devil’s bargain.
“Hoover, damn
it!
”
Four faces. No shared anything.
“Wow!”
He fell back on the couch, heart beating.
“You son of a gun!”
His stomach rumbled. That cheeseburger. Maybe he should go to the bathroom. But then the dudes were enacting a story from their recent airplane ride over here from America. They were called Tennessee, recently signed to Virgin and here on a press junket.
“Tennessee what?” Shane asked, wiping his nose.
“Just Tennessee,” said Dave the drummer.
“After a state?”
“Of mind.”
Postnasal drip kicked in. Stimulant stalactites.
“But you guys aren’t from Tennessee, right?”
“Shut up, PB and J!” said Ron. “We’re telling a story!”
Cocaine popped open his eyes. He just wanted to sit here forever, sit and be around their happiness, sit in rock-and-roll fellowship. For once.
Ron told a story of his entrance into the Mile High Club and acted it out, twisting his body wildly, propping up his legs, thrusting.
“I was like …
this,
and she was like …
that,
and we were like … God, man, can I do this! … We were like
that!
” Ron motioned to one of the ladies. “Baby, get under me to complete the image.”
She assumed a position and he began to dry-hump her. No compromise of character was involved.
“So then we had to prop ourselves up … like … oh shit!”
Ron lost his balance, teetered in the air. Laughter propped him up for a second. Laughter freed him of gravity for a blessed moment before he went crashing, on his back, into the oak side table, breaking it in two.
“Fuck, Ron! Jesus!”
Splinters of faux-antique wood cracked; drinks ran onto the white carpet. They fell over in hysterics, bowed their heads in prayer to the rock-and-roll gods, for which destruction of hotel property was the surest sign of Providence.
Shane couldn’t manage a smile.
“Oh my fuckin’ God!” Ron laughed from the floor. “Oh man! Ouch!”
“Oh baby!” said the girl who’d been under him, after falling to the floor in mock worry. “Sweet lord!” she said, and stroked his scruffy face.
Shane felt old. He’d never felt old before. Ten minutes with Tennessee had aged him ten years.
“Excuse me,” he said, and rushed to the bathroom.
He could have been taking a shit on the couch and they wouldn’t have noticed. Fun was a big fucking wall of sound protecting them from the feedback screech of reality. Fun was a brand-spanking-new record deal from Virgin.
“Oh damn!”
“My head!”
“Oh baby, baby!”
“Shit, dude, that was a fucking
table!
”
Cocaine. What was he thinking? Cocaine was for Darlo and Joey and the otherwise vacant, a drug that catered not to the enlargement of the spirit, like ecstasy, for example, which put you in tune with loving one another, accepting the faults, finding the good. Cocaine was a crash course in coveting, a fast track to envy and hubris and fake possibility.
Also it gave him a rotten headache and made his eyes expand, like maybe they’d burst out of their sockets, and made his throat close up.
“Now look at you,” he said to the bathroom mirror, shaking a little, throwing water on his face. “Now you just look at you look at you look at you!”
There was a knock on the door. Room service. The clanging of plates and pots ricocheted off his punctured eardrums, and he slid to the floor, covering them. His stomach rumbled like a fucking alien was in there.
His phone rang. Bobby. “What do
you
want?”
“Hold, please, for an atheist!” Bobby laughed. “Hold, please, for the Enlightenment!”
Bobby, I won’t let you mock me.
“Hold, please, for the theory of evolution!” Bobby yelled. “Hold, please, for Newton and Copernicus!”
This is what you get, he thought, when you punch a man’s tooth from his face. This is what violence begets. A transmission, a sign, at the bottom of life’s well.