The artistic personality was a nice way of saying bipolar disorder, they said. You had music as a hobby, but you didn’t pursue it. It just wasn’t a viable option. “You have a great career ahead of you,” his father said, trying to understand, failing, frowning. “You got such good marks on the GRE…you can go to Stanford if you want. Is it the drugs? Are you doing the drugs, is that why you want to quit?”
Quit. Quit he says. “Man, my whole fucking life has been just one big quit. This is the only thing that feels like it could get some soul in me for once, you dig?” That goddamned artistic personality, making you think you could get away with saying “you dig?”
His dad shook his head, frowning, saying, “When I was growing up you dreamed of getting a good job and working hard at it. And when you got an opportunity, you made the best of it. I just can’t…can’t…”
They were pressing in on him, hemming him in. He felt stencil-steel on his flesh but he went beyond the edges, he was an aberration. Yeah, shit, yes it was the drugs but it was more than that. It was the whole fucking shit, the kit n caboodle, the murderous line slashed across your life that went work, drink, work until you saw the rusty burned-out gates at the end where the rest of your family sat waiting, hollow-eyed and fat. And they said this is a reaction, you won’t feel like that forever, it will go away.
“What will? My life?” he spat. He sounded trite and he realized he wasn’t very good at fighting because he’d sucked everything up til now, he could only awkwardly stumble his way through the argument, but he did it and fuck the rest.
He took the shitty Ford and his friends and hit the road. It was dirty, scuzzy, cut up into stillshots from the fitful snatches of sleep and the lines on the mirror and the sour-smelling bars. He said to Davie the bassist when they were in Alabama somewhere, “Let’s get some dope,” and they shot up with two good ole boys in a garden-style apartment with aluminum lawn chairs on the untended lawn. And the fastfood wrappers and empty bottles and dirt seemed like the most beautiful grails in the world when he was sliding along on the feeling, but then when he woke up with a start at four a.m. and realized the profundity of his squalor, he ran outside in complete terror and ended up in the woods where a wolf confronted him in the dark harsh hollows of some wild country he’d become wholly estranged from. And in the coldsweat panic he fought the wolf because it was his father and he had to kill it, make it submit, make it understand, and the thing just tore him up and it was eighteen hours before people got their shit together enough to come find him.
He needed a blood transfusion and he drifted in and out of consciousness forever, falling up and through the layers of his mind, his parents were there, they said please come home and he told them to fuck off and leave him alone. His manager said his parents had paid for the hospital bills and then they were back on the road and he was sharing needles with girls in Seattle, kissing them and setting them up with another shot. Davie wasn’t there but some other guy was, someone he couldn’t trust, but everything floated away and he was happy, he was there.
They released a single, got some press, attended parties. Onstage he attacked the guitar like it was a wild animal, mauling the strings, cutting his fingers up because he refused to use a pick and he strummed in this self-mutilating fashion that made people want to be like him. Onstage he didn’t give a fuck, he wasn’t there, he was letting the sounds take his place, the world became dim and remote. Sweat poured out of him and he ended shows completely drenched, and some snarky writer someplace called him “Poolboy” and it stuck, he was “Poolboy” and he grinned when they told him to grin.
In the studio he and Davie and Rita the drummer laid down tracks, fought, shot each other dirty glances. Poolboy asked if he could do lead vocals on one, then said why ask, it was about fucking time he got the chance, and Davie relented, drunk and a little worried. But Poolboy killed the lead, he grabbed the mic and tore it to pieces with the blades in his throat and the sound engineer Mike Orlean went, “Fuckin’ magic!” and the song peaked at number 14 on the weekly charts. It was 37 the next week, 43 the next, and then gone, but it was still the biggest thing ever.
“Lyrics to No One” was the album that followed and it was both extolled and slandered, but they kept on going and the equipment got nicer and the parties had significantly more women (which Rita didn’t care for, she hated the floozies and just glared at them from behind a Camel Filter) and in the interviews they said, “So tell us about this wolf story” and leaned forward with a friendly, expectant smile. And the first few times he gave some half-hearted reply, never the full story, and then the last time he was skagged out and picked up a folding chair and swung it at the guy’s prizewinning teeth.
After that it was apology, rehab, apology, and the crest they’d been riding fell out from underneath them, and Rita and Davie started to actively hate their third member. They’d write songs without him, collaborate with another guitarist. His song got the most airplay, even now, and it made Davie furious sometimes, almost all the time actually. Their manager would come in and say, “Where’s Poolboy?” and they’d shrug their shoulders with affected nonchalance and say, “Out for a swim.”
And Poolboy, aka World Fuck-Up Extraordinaire, would slum it as hard and long as he could, pushing the frail lines of his body far past what they could predict at the hospitals. One of the doctors had been particularly blunt, he was too tired to think about fame: “So when you get AIDS, we’ll try and keep you on your feet as long as we can.”
But he didn’t get AIDS, and he didn’t get what was happening. He showed up at Rita’s apartment in the middle of the night, or was it just an exceptionally overcast day?, and he tried to kiss her but she stubbed her Camel Filter out on his face and roundhouse kicked him into her kitchen table and got him an icepack to keep the shame from swelling too much. It did anyway, and she sat him down and asked questions like, “Why the fuck are you trying to be a complete stereotype?” and snorted at his ridiculous half-truths. “You’re not paying me to be your shrink, and I wouldn’t even if you fuckin’ bought me a house in Dublin, so go see a damn shrink.”
“If you were my shrink, I wouldn’t be allowed to date you for like two years after we finished or something,” he said, and she said, “That’s an incentive, but if I was your mother you wouldn’t ever be allowed to date me but I still don’t want to be your fuckin’ mom or your shrink.”
He saw a shrink. A man, strangely enough. He thought they were all women. He had teeth kind of like the guy he took a swing at with the chair and he mentioned that and the dude said, “How do you feel about me right now?” and Poolboy said, “I want to fucking smash your good-looking teeth in,” and that got them going.
He came to the studio, made a tense peace with Davie, jammed with him once or twice. It was like going to the movies with a girl you dated five years ago. They got drunk one night and Davie went nuts, smashing things, grinding the glass into his hands and yelling, “Fuck Jesus Christ!” over and over and Poolboy had to take care of him, hustle him out of the outraged and horrified bar, get him to his place and explain to his girlfriend that he’d been in a fight with some lunatic. It looked like the girlfriend had seen a lot of this because she curled her lip in that contemptuous way people do when they are intimately familiar with another person’s bad habit and went back to bed.
“I’m a straight-up alcoholic,” Davie mumbled as the blood seeped through the bandages on his palms, and Poolboy wondered if he should take him to a hospital. They fell asleep and when Poolboy woke up Davie was crying at the kitchen table and looking at his ruined hands. “Why did I fuck myself in the ass like that? What the fuck is wrong with me?”
And the girlfriend was out somewhere so Poolboy phoned Rita and she reluctantly came over and saw her bassist’s hands and then forced them into her van to go to the hospital.
After that Davie went in a twelve-step program, found the wagon a bit too bumpy to maintain his balance, absconded to Mexico with a Danish model. “We’re not famous enough for this shit,” Rita said, she wondered why she had to be the anchor in this fucked triumvirate, she had a mountain of problems that sat in her head like reveling partiers who refused to leave.
She and Poolboy cut a few tracks, got a session bassist, left messages on Davie’s phone. They thought about how shitty their contract was, tried to ignore how hard they were being screwed. Working late one night, Rita said, “I often want to stick my cigarette into Ralphie’s fat eye,” Ralphie being their manager, and Poolboy said, “You have a thing with jabbing that cigarette into people” and Rita broke down crying and muttered something about her useless fucking father and left.
Poolboy quit the shrink, did the support group, swore at them, went on coke binges and speedballed with a panoply of Dionysian libertines. His family swam somewhere in the background, vaguely lemon-scented, and he almost felt like there was something he was missing.
He went to Rita’s in April and tried to kiss her again and she said next time and I kill you and she tossed him out.
Davie was seen in Miami, in Austin, Texas. He went to Germany for Oktoberfest and ended up on YouTube when he jammed with a famous punk band from Frankfurt. There was talk that the Concrete Marbles were looking at him as a replacement for their bass player, who had died from alcohol poisoning.
“I know when I need a new liver I go trawling around the pubs,” Rita was quoted as saying. Davie responded with an angry tirade at his apparently “old” band and capitalism in general and was lauded as an idiot by the news for a brief time.
Poolboy’s sister called, she was a lawyer, she said she hated to intrude on his life but dad was in a bad way and would he
He was on the next flight out without even thinking, he took six Percocet before they’d reached cruising altitude and he kept the Scotch and sodas coming until he woke up in the hospital but this time he was standing at the foot of the bed and his dad was translated into a little green line on a black monitor and he saw the ragged pulses of a body on its way out.
It was the second heart attack, and had he heard about the first, did they send a card, or what had he been doing then? He focused for a long time on a speck of dust on the windowsill near the bed and it was really important to him that it didn’t change.
His mother tried to ask him things, his sister was well-dressed and stood a respectful distance away from everything, she didn’t want to sink the tentacles of emotion into any of them, they were all fucking crazy, and she had to keep the crazy back as hard as she could.
“And I was using heroin all the time and you didn’t care!” he was screaming, oh why did it have to be this way, he was causing a scene and making it about him, the tabloids will love this, he was eerily aware of his absurdity as he engaged in it, both actor and witness, and his dad lousy with tubes said, “It was the drinking, it was the drinking that did it to all of you” and mom held his hand and said, “Shh, shh, don’t be silly. We all love you.” And she gave that severe surreptitious glare to her kids that said right? and then the madness was forgotten, Poolboy was a loving, caring son, and Alexandra his sister managed a wan smile and she was trying to dam back the history of all their shit
and then she was hitting, punching her dying father, clawing at his face and her mother was shrieking, “Please! Please! Oh my God!” and then Poolboy was restraining the sister he’d shared forty words with over eight or nine years and Alexandra was sobbing, it was all spilling out, the black venomous death lying at the bottom of her soul like the sludge at the bottom of her Turkish coffee “You made us into fucking freaks, you goddamn lunatic!”
Poolboy was sweating uncontrollably, he was soaking wet, but he managed to hold on to his sister as she went berserkergang, and he saw all the filth and anger of his own heart reflected in her raw curses and kind of loved her again.
Their mother was weeping in a chair and the nurses were trying to sort it all out, and all the time Alexandra was trying to move towards her father like a gorilla trying to crush something that threatened its child, and Poolboy was whispering in her ear, “It’s okay, I love you, it’s okay. Just say everything, it’s okay.”
And the day ended and their daddy hadn’t yet died, and their poor distraught mother stayed in the room until they threw her out and Poolboy went to his hotel room until his sister phoned and he checked out and threw his suitcase on the guest bed. They drank coffee long into the night and Poolboy thought about scoring but he didn’t have time and he kept trying to focus on what his sister was saying and finally she was saying, “I have wanted to do that…for a long. Time. All this Catholic keep-shit-in is fucking done. Sometimes I’d see you fighting your guitar in videos and stuff, and hear about the outbursts, and I’d want to do the same thing, just be free of it all.”
And he looked right in her eyes and his face was drawn into the hollow mask he’d been tortured in his sleep by and he said, “I’m never free, man. This shit fuckin’ dogs me like that dude from No Country For Old Men.”
He wanted to score and he told her and he’d never told someone outside the meetings about that, about the instance of actual consuming desire, and she stayed awake with him watching the first two Die Hard movies and passing out in the first scene of the third, even though it was a lot better than the second.
In the morning their daddy was dead and it was pretty awkward. Alexandra oscillated between nervous breakdown and total detachment and Poolboy was strangely calmed by it all, he felt like a chapter had been ended and most of the nasty plot elements had been taken care of. When he had a moment he called up Rita and filled her in on the important points.
“He’s dead, huh? Was he a bastard?”
“No, yeah, well no. He was just all fucked-up and he couldn’t help spreading his fucked-upness around.”
“So your mom’s a bitch for marrying him.”
“Eh. I don’t know, not really. She was just looking for love or whatever. Hard to predict what he’d turn out like. It wasn’t all that bad now that I think about it. But maybe that’s shock or something?”
“Sure. I’m gonna throw a party when my daddy dies. Motherfucker did shit I won’t ever tell you about in a million years.”
“I won’t ask.”
“I won’t tell.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
The connection fizzled for a bit, picked back up, and Rita was clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “If you want some sort of comforting thing, I don’t really do that dude.”
“I know. Just wanted to let you know what’s up. Might be a few days before I can get back.”
“Take your time. I love being under a four-album contract to a bunch of assholes.”
“We’ll finish this one in three months and release a best-of, Rita.”
“If only things were that simple, Poolboy. Now go make your mom feel like she did a good job and shit.”
The funeral was stiff and grim, full of alcoholic Catholics and the hollow-eyed chaff that are left in their wake — lots of clinging dependent personalities and drugged substance abusers. The priest was somewhere in the middle of those two fucked-up lines and he tried to make the Bible sound like it did in his head, but he thought he did a pretty shitty job of it and he resisted the impulse to hit himself as the sniffling grievers filed out of the cemetery. Poolboy caught a whiff of this and murmured, “Good job,” before the wrinkled old man went off to do his priestly things. The priest knew about this poor lost child and felt a weird mixture of self-loathing and anger, he was afraid that the scraggly-haired man-child with the track marks on his arms could see straight through to him, to the scared little boy looking for an answer. He resisted as strongly as he wanted to say, “Jesus Christ, it’s so hard, it’s just so fucking hard” and bond with the guitarist for a short moment over a tragic event and the more general tragedy that had run like a tornado carving a swath of destruction through their lives.But Poolboy knew and he understood.
He kissed his mom, he told Alexandra he’d visit soon. She said she was thinking of killing herself and he stayed another week, earning him a pissed-off call from his manager. “Get out of my life, you worm,” he wanted to say, but some weird part of him had felt like he learned something and he said, “Thanks for being patient for so long Ralphie, but you know I’ll be back soon and then I’ll be around for awhile. My dad can only die once, you know.” And that shut him up good.
This openness thing with his sister was a hell of a challenge. Years of yeses and nos, Merry Christmas and Happy Easter, and now this. Why was it that they didn’t have children? Alexandra had a bitter divorce behind her and no current love prospects. She felt like she couldn’t be near anyone, not for real. Poolboy didn’t have the divorce but being real and honest with someone was about as painful for him as stabbing himself, so he got that. “Ironically, stabbing myself seems less painful, since I’ve sort of made a habit out of it with these needles…” Somehow this made his sister laugh, and by the time he’d left Alexandra had calmed down considerably. “Expect at least one frantic call in the middle of the night while I’m clutching a bottle of wine and a handful of Xanax,” she said before he went through security at the airport.
“You’re really great at goodbyes,” he answered.
His mom couldn’t be there, she was taking care of the after-people-die stuff, but she had called and tearfully wished him goodbye. She would probably never totally forgive them for the way they’d ended with their dad, but she was strong enough to keep going and keep loving them. Shit, she’d persevered through a twenty-nine year marriage with a crazy alcoholic, so she could survive this too.
In the studio Davie was back, and for a moment Poolboy’s heart leapt up at the thought of them all being together again, but he was fighting with Ralphie and Rita about royalties, the continued use of the band’s name. He was talking lawyers and remuneration. The circles under his eyes told them he was in a bad way with Johnnie Walker, but he was so much of an asshole they didn’t care. They went to court, pulled money out of their own pockets, tried to finish the album. The label smelled financial losses from a mile away and put the screws to them hard. A junkie band with modest sales embroiled in an acrimonious legal battle and lagging on their contract fulfillment was not something to be tolerated.
Rita wanted to rush the album, get it the fuck out there so they could be that much closer to leaving the whole sordid mess behind, but Poolboy said no. He asked her, considerately, sitting her down at a restaurant in a decent part of town. “Could we do this the right way? Throwing out the biggest middle finger we can manage and doing it better than everybody else?” She’d pondered, lit up a Camel Filter, shot the waiter a withering glare when he explained you couldn’t smoke inside anymore, carefully stubbed out the untouched cigarette on the nice tablecloth, and nodded curtly.
They hired a bassist named Ferdinand, some crazy Dutch guy, and he was so exuberant and wild that he infused their longstanding malaise with something akin to joy. They crashed out track after track and Poolboy sang lead on half the songs, alternately screaming and lilting in a reedy falsetto. Rita sang a few too, and Ferdinand contributed a loopy polka-like tune that would end up making them a ton of money. Poolboy’s favorite, though, was “Red Hot Billy Weathers”, a duet between Rita and him, bluesy and sparse, with cowbell on every 4. It was the closest he’d get to kissing her, he’d say.
They got pretty famous after that, and critics said they might’ve eclipsed the short burst of notoriety surrounding Poolboy’s first song on lead vocals. He never could remember the name of that damn song.
Ferdinand stuck around and they ended up doing a double-album to end their contract (they pulled a few B-sides but who cares it was still impressive). Davie kept on suing them and they went to an independent label and kept making tunes. Poolboy wasn’t quite so insane when he was onstage, but he still sweat like a motherfucker. He relapsed once or twice, but he kept at the meetings and did ibogaine root with Rita as his monitor. He’d heard about the miracle drug from Africa that could make a junky stop craving and decided what the hell. It started with a long, slow come-up — a warm, good dream like the kind you have when your innocence is still sort-of intact — and then he was flung out over an abyss, screaming and soaking his bedsheets with more sweat than there was flesh, and he saw that goddamned wolf in the forest in Alabama staring at him with its yellowy moon eyes and he had to fight it and this time he grabbed it in a headlock and crushed its fucking throat as it clawed desperately at his body and he felt a thing snap in him that changed everything and he was standing at the foot of his father’s bed and he had a do-over.
“Dad, I’m sorry I fucked up.”
“Son, you didn’t fuck up anything. Well, you did, but I did worse than you ever could. So don’t go around hating yourself so much.”
“Are you…happy?”
“I can’t say. I’m happy sometimes. I’m sure depressed as hell a lot. I realize now I woulda done a lot of things differently if I could go back now.”
“But you can’t…right?”
His dad looked down at the tubes riddling his body, the swollen gut and curling toenails. “I don’t suppose you can. Unless you count your kids as doing it all over again.” He looked up at Poolboy.
“Seems like some cyclical shit I guess.”
“I guess.”
This hallucinatory conversation wasn’t any less awkward than their real-life ones had been. But whatever. He had to make do.
“Dad, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry, I am too.”
“You gonna be all right?”
“Probably not, but I’ll give it a shot. Take care of your mother.”
When he came to, Rita was sitting by his bed with a cup of tea and a cigarette. “Those for me?” he asked weakly.
“No, but I can get you some Domino’s or something if you give me ten bucks.”
He realized it was a full day later, and he felt like he’d sweated twenty pounds off his already-twiggy frame. She’d been a mensch and stocked the fridge full of Gatorade and he spent the afternoon sucking them down while nibbling on lukewarm pizza.
“I think I want fruit or something, actually,” he said.
“Ew, healthy things?” She raised an eyebrow. It seemed like the first time she’d actually been worried about him.
“Yeah, I guess that’s pretty fucked up…”
Two days later he was in the studio again, feeling weirdly fresh, and he came up with a cool riff on the spot. “I think we can make something out of that,” their new manager said, and this one was actually able to say “we” and get away with it.
Ferdinand gave a beefy thumbs-up and said, “Baller, dude!”
The three of them noodled with the riff and built a rhythm arrangement around it, working late and not caring too much. When they’d finished Rita said, “Want to go for a swim, Poolboy?” and they drove to the ocean and swam around in the cold until it got light out.