Rock Bottom

by Michael Shilling

Genres: Literary Fiction; Satire; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Once, the Blood Orphans had it all: a million-dollar recording contract from Warner Brothers, killer hooks, and cheekbones that could cut glass. Four pretty boys from Los Angeles, they were supposed to be the next big thing, future kings of rock and roll. But something happened on the way to glory, and now, two years later, along with their coke-fueled, mohawked female manager, they have washed up in Amsterdam for the final show of their doomed and dismal European tour. The singer has become a born-again Buddhist who preaches from the stage, the bass player's raging eczema has turned his hands into a pulpy mess, the drummer is a sex-fiend tormented by the misdeeds of his porn-king father, and the guitar player -- the only talented one -- is thoroughly cowed by the constant abuse of his bandmates. As they stumble through their final day together, the Blood Orphans find themselves on a comic tour of frustration, danger, excitement, and just possibly, redemption.

Release date: December 24, 2008

Publisher: Back Bay Books

Print pages: 373

Sample

Advance acclaim for Michael Shilling’s

Rock Bottom

“A rock-and-roll novel at once rocking and rollicking. Rock Bottom knowingly skewers the pretensions of the music business, while never taking them seriously, and the result is a simultaneously scabrous yet affectionate portrait of a band and its entourage in the final throes of a tour de farce. Michael Shilling writes with wit, fury, and an infectious gusto; it’s the kind of high-energy prose that makes readers want to get up and strut their stuff.”

—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

“Rock Bottom is a raunchy, knowing, brilliant novel—a diamond-sharp, lightning-witted, sex-packed, hilarious account of the last days of a fallen-from-grace hard rock band, marooned in Amsterdam under the crashing ruins of a lost greatness. Shilling, himself a former musician, is our insider guide to the ravages and seductions of the rock-and-roll world, and he describes the sights with a tender, pitch-perfect savagery. But more than this, the novel is a remarkably accomplished piece of art—a complicated survivor’s tale full of hilarious sadness, virtuous cruelty, beautiful destruction— the sort of book you pick up with high expectations and that, to your surprise and delight, surpasses them all. A book funnier, smarter, sadder, and more inventively composed than you could possibly have hoped. It’s a hit—I mean, I was laughing all the way through, and singing along.”

—Michael Byers, author of Long for This World

“Michael Shilling’s debut is everything one wants in a novel: tragic and thrilling, farcical and realistic. The prose is exuberant in its range and wildness, but also in its little treasures, its unfoldings and depths. Here is a writer who brings characters to life, circumstances to light, and imbues them with resonance, traveling the whole map of human obsession and longing with breathless energy. This is a sexy, funny novel, but with the kind of profundity we need from our best novelists at this time. Michael Shilling is an important new writer, and this is a novel you won’t forget having read.”

—Laura Kasischke, author of The Life Before Her Eyes and Suspicious River

“Finally, at last, an ass-kicking, authentic rock-and-roll novel, one that peels back the veneer and gloss and—with an insider’s eye—exposes the lovely, wondrous dirt.”

—David Means, author of Assorted Fire Events

1

BOBBY HAD BEEN AWAKE for about ten seconds when his hands started to itch. His poor fucking hands, cracked and raw with eczema, stuck out of the blanket like rotting snails.

“Nice,” he said. “Real nice.”

He lay on a cot in Morten’s living room. Morten, a friend of Helen, their European booking agent, was one of those starfuckers-in-spirit who put bands up so he could be part of the rock-and-roll underground railroad. No one in Blood Orphans had met Morten — he was a banker always away on business — and this time around he had apparently neglected to pay his heating bill.

“Fucking Euro icebox,” Bobby hissed. “Unbelievable.”

In the late-autumn half-light of the gloomy Amsterdam morning, Bobby stared at his hands with sadness and wonder. The eczema, a lifelong nuisance that in the past year had become a scourge, started off as little bubbles of lymph that, upon being opened by his stubby nails, caked into a yellow curd, burned like they had salt rubbed in them, and made playing the bass guitar a painful chore. Made him have to keep his semirancid left palm away from the pick guard and pluck gingerly. Forced him to play nothing but root notes, because every time his fingers moved, the fretboard bit them like a fucking cobra.

He gutted his left palm for a minute. It felt like he was getting to the bottom of something.

The blankets Morten had provided were for children, puny swatches of acrylic adorned with the actions of different cartoon characters. On Bobby’s blanket, Underdog soared to the rescue in a long cape, his ears floppy, his grin light.

Bobby sat up and flexed his feet. Around him, in little Euro cots — always too short, always too narrow — slept Darlo and Adam, the drummer and guitar player. Shane, the singer, was missing, and that was fine with Bobby. He hated Shane, that faux-spiritual prick. And without Shane around, he didn’t have to divide his attention. He could fully focus on his recurring fantasy of killing Darlo. Wiggling his freezing toes, Bobby imagined going into the kitchen, finding a big fucking knife, and slashing the drummer’s smug, sex-addicted, square-jawed face until it looked like a Levolor blind. For fucking all the girls Bobby wanted to fuck. For constantly mocking his lack of musical ability. For exuding a smooth idiot confidence Bobby envied in a way that bordered on obsession.

Darlo slept with his hands behind his head, his mouth slackened into a smile, at perfect ease. Glyphs of Wonder Woman covered his blanket.

Blood Orphans had played in Amsterdam last night, and they were playing there tonight as well. The record company, determined to bury them alive, had conspired with the booking agency to get them a two-night stand at the new and improved Star Club. The original Star Club, in Hamburg, was where a band called the Beatles had spent four months in leather jackets and pompadours, honing their skills before they ate the world. Recently, some rich Dutchie had opened his own Star Club on the bank of the Amstel. Helen, who, like most booking agents, thought she was a strategic genius, had decided that Blood Orphans could really profit from bathing in the quasi-historical wave pool of an ill-conceived tourist trap.

“What a way to end a tour, huh?” she’d said. “Go out with a bang, right?”

More like a whimper, a peep, the distant screech of a rodent under the wheels of a truck. Bobby couldn’t quite believe it, but here it was, the last day of their last tour. Tomorrow he’d be on a plane to Los Angeles, this grand failure over, and he’d be back in the world, where Blood Orphans was just some band that had blown its chance, and he was an unemployed loser.

He couldn’t wait.

In ripped black T-shirt and banana-print boxers, Bobby shuffled into the kitchen and located the coffeemaker, an old, nasty Braun shellacked with the dirt of a thousand grubby rock musicians’ paws. He poured ground coffee and grimaced. Dirt; there was a time when he wouldn’t even have noticed. There was a time, on the first or second or even third tour, when everything had seemed part of some higher pattern of beauty. Back before they’d been branded racists. Back when all the teeth in his mouth were real. Back before the riot in Sweden, the jail time in Omaha, and a thousand utterly predictable days in that shitty van.

He paused in these ruminations to scratch furiously at his hands, rubbing and digging like a psychopath plotting with invisible allies. The dermal demolition proceeded so well, so much better than anything else ever did, that he kept at it until he felt a robust rip in his right palm.

“Oh fuck,” he muttered, the rapture broken. “Oh well.”

“Mommy!” Adam yelled from his bed. The guitar player often cried out for his mother in his sleep. His small blankets of shit acrylic were festooned with images of Mickey Mouse in top hat and tails.

“Shut up, please,” Bobby grumbled. “Poncy little girl.”

“Mommmaaa!” Adam howled in response, his voice echoing through the place, distant yet piercing, like something off a Pink Floyd record.

While the coffee brewed, Bobby went into the bathroom and looked for provisions to soothe his hands. In two years of touring he’d raided many a medicine cabinet for salves and ointments. He had tried Nivea and Aveeno. Doused his hands in shea butter and Cetaphil. Done a dance of olive oil and calendula and minerals from the Dead Sea, prayed to the gods of aloe vera, camphor, and almond blossom, worshipped at the dark altar of cortisone. For all this he had been forsaken.

He stepped into the shower, the soap-spattered curtain of which showed the Justice League doing its thing, wrinkled up and warped from countless hours of rank musician scrubbing. Dried rivulets of mold ran down the plastic.

If there was one thing Bobby missed about America, it was bathroom life — how hot water was hot, cold water was cold, and both were right on time. Here in Europe the ham was meatier, the beer was hoppier, the sex was another thing completely, but the plumbing was ancient, the pressure in the pipes was anemic, and the toilets had the hole at the back of the bowl, allowing one to examine one’s waste for approval before signing off. This variance in toilet architecture had spooked Bobby into a long month of constipation. Now he only played when his body went into the red. He only played to a sold-out crowd.

When the soap touched his raw right hand, the lather turned into a mass of bees.

“I am so cosmically fucked,” he said, and stared into the sputtering showerhead.

He dried off with one of those tiny Euro towels — thin and nonabsorbent — applied Eucerin to his hands, shook them like they were on fire, and retrieved ten Band-Aids from his stash. Soon his hands were covered. The Mummy, back in black.

Navigating the uselessness of hands covered in latex, he put on the same clothes he’d worn for a week, including jeans so ripe they could walk away. Then he poured some coffee, procured sugar and milk, and lit a cigarette.

Euro cigarettes were not fucking around. Instantly the day improved. But then his phone rang. His bell tolled.

It was Joey. The manager. The fucking day tripper. That bitch.

“Yeah?” Bobby said. “What?”

“Hey, babe,” she said, in a cocaine hum. “Good morning.”

“What the fuck do you want?”

“Don’t be like that, Bobby. Play nice.”

“Play nice?” He growled. “Come on tour and see how much you want to play nice.”

“How are your hands?”

“I said, what the fuck do you want? Why are you calling me?”

“I’m calling you,” the manager said, “because I just got to Amsterdam, and I’m sitting here at a café outside my hotel.”

“And?”

“And I knew you’d be the only one up.”

“And?”

“And I thought you’d want to come over here and imbibe, partake, and otherwise dilate.”

He put the coffee cup down. “Is that so?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “It is so.”

“You and that bindle of coke getting a wittle wone-wey?”

She waited for a second. “I’m trying to reach out to you, Bobby. Don’t be a dick.”

He hung up on her.

Fucking Joey. Her talents, which had seemed so formidable at first, had a wicked fucking half-life now. The conniving witch hadn’t delivered shit for them since the day the ink went dry on their Warners contract.

Had she stopped the absolutely career-crippling racism charge? No.

Had she kept Aerosmith from dropping Blood Orphans from their tour of America’s finest sports arenas? No.

Had she stopped their slow slide into booking agent hell, from favorites at William Morris to the laughingstock of the interns’ desk at Who Gives a Shit Booking? She had not.

At least she hadn’t slept with Darlo. At least, if only for reasons involving power and control, she had denied the drummer a place between her slamming little legs, kept him hurting, kept him frustrated. That made Joey a little bit of a saint to Bobby, carved out a special place for her in his weary, bitter heart.

Big deal, he thought. She was still an incompetent cokehead shill, and they were still the worst fucking band in existence.

A wasp flew by his head and started banging itself against the cold windowpane. This wasp had missed the last flight out of summer and would soon die a cold, exoskeletal death in a bland Amsterdam apartment.

Bobby always appreciated others with whom he could find kinship, and this wasp fit the bill nicely. Like the wasp, he too had been led astray by his instincts and was now at the whim of vast forces, forces beyond comprehension in the complexity with which they had ruined his life. Every day was a cold window to bang one’s head against.

“Oh, little wasp,” he said, “ye I shall free.”

And with that he smashed the insect against the pane, exploding its rust-orange exo-body but also creating a solid fracture in the glass, a flat skein that resembled the interstate in North Dakota, upon which they had often trod.

The wasp, splattered in the center, was reborn as Bismarck.

“Bad omen,” Bobby said. “I’m outta here.”

He donned his bomber jacket and went down the Dutch stairs, into this last miserable morning of tour. On the banister, he left behind a goo of rot.

Morten’s apartment lay on a fashionable street. Lanterns decorated the sidewalk. Scanning the storefronts, Bobby saw three posh clothing stores, a pharmacy with a hand-carved dove for a sign, and several restaurants with thousand-euro signage. Next door to Morten’s, an Internet café was opening.

“Oh, sweet,” he said, and flicked his cigarette to the pavement.

The café had that chic modern primitive vibe that plagued European hipster establishments, and smelled of sandalwood, cloves, and espresso. Behind the counter, a skinny aging hippie in overalls read a copy of De Telegraaf. Brown dreadlocks accentuated his receding hairline. He was smoking a fat spliff, and smiled as Bobby approached.

“Do you mind speaking English?” Bobby asked. “I no sprecken ze Dutch.”

Natty Dread nodded. “Sure, man. Sure.”

“A double espresso, please.” He looked in the glass case. “And that pastry.”

“The mazette?”

“Yeah, I guess. What’s a mazette?”

The hippie’s sallow stoned eyes gazed at him. “French for fool.”

“Perfect, then.”

A short, foxy girl with shoulder-length henna-red hair came in. She looked like that chick from Run Lola Run, wearing black eye shadow and something in the vein of a Catholic schoolgirl’s uniform. Bobby’s hands tingled. She smiled at him and sat down at a computer.

If Darlo were here, he thought reflexively, that girl wouldn’t stand a chance.

Chewing on his mazette, which was just a safe house for powdered sugar, Bobby stared at the front page of yesterday’s International Herald Tribune, which someone had left on a stool. He read the headlines, America this and America that, but nothing registered. After five futile weeks combing Europe for an audience, America was just a dream now. Until he emerged from the gate at Long Beach, America would feel no closer to him than Atlantis.

“What is that you are humming, man?” asked Natty Dread.

“Jethro Tull,” he said. “ ‘Aqualung.’ ”

The man smiled, then pointed to the ceiling.

“You are staying with Morten, no doubt?”

“Roger that.”

“Over and out.” He made a thumbs-up. “Sweet, dude.”

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. . . .