Free Rock Bottom by Michael Shilling

going to help me or what?”
    “Hmm,” he said. “Actually, no.”
    Shane huffed. “Why are you doing this?”
    “Because I hate you.”
    “It’s an emergency.”
    “Talk to God about it.”
    “Fuck you, Bobby,” he said. “Fuck you and your fucking —”
    Bobby hung up, satisfied. Contributing to Shane’s despair cast a dazzling ray over his already bright mood.
    “Your bandmate?” Sarah asked.
    “That’s right. The singer. Piece of shit.”
    “That’s not a nice thing to say,” she said. “Really.”
    “I have my reasons,” he said, and cracked a rotting knuckle.
    They’d come upon the superstore, which was called Fame.
    “This is silly,” he said, stepping back. “We’re not going to find the record.”
    She raised her eyebrows. “You’re not making all of this up, are you?”
    “Of course not.”
    She took his hand. “Let’s go in. My curiosity is killing me.”
    The bass player felt the familiar hum of humiliation coming on. Aerosmith’s new record,
Rockin’ the Joint,
was prominently displayed, and Franz Ferdinand blasted through the speakers, their ferocious, angular, and undeniably pro stomp coming down on Bobby to call bullshit on his very soul.
    “Oh, I love this song!” Sarah said, and shook her plaid ass.
    Bobby had been in this situation before, experienced the awfulness of not being able to find the record in a megastore while trying to impress a girl, saw the way he shrank in said girl’s eyes when the store clerk tried not to laugh when she said that he was in Blood Orphans, and come on, there must be one copy of the record here! No? Not one?
Not one?
    And then Bobby’s heart skipped a beat. In a corner, in the farthest shadowy reaches of the pop/rock section, he saw his face.
    “Oh my God!” Sarah said. “Look at that!”
    Bobby’s mouth dropped wide open, gaped at the wall display. An oversized poster of their album cover. The four faces of Blood Orphans gazing up from some primeval darkness, looking tough, righteous, and blissfully unaware of the misery ahead.
    They were arranged like a compass. Darlo was north, Adam was west, Shane was east, and Bobby was dead south.
    Below them, in Old English font,
Blood Orphans,
and below that,
Rocket Heart,
and below that,
June 23.
Down at the edge, someone had tagged a small Post-it note and scrawled
Star Club November 24–25.
    Four faces in the shadows, come from mighty Los Angeles to completely fucking fool themselves.
    Sarah grabbed his arm and jumped up and down. “Holy shit!” she said. “That’s totally you!”
    “How?” he said through the fog of war. “What?”
    A clerk stopped, looked at the picture, looked at him, pushed his lower lip out, tapped his clipboard. “You?” he said while blasts of Scottish melody and syncopation thundered out of the speakers. “You?”
    “Him!” Sarah said, and pulled Bobby close to the poster. “Wow!”
    Bobby stared at himself and barely recognized the kid he saw. He looked healthy and free, happy and cocksure.
    “I totally thought you were lying,” she said. “I don’t believe it!”
    As he stood there with this adorable girl suddenly holding on to his arm with both hands, a certainty about the finalities of time settled and took hold. The boy in the picture, his head pushed defiantly upward, could never have imagined anything that Bobby felt here, without the use of his opposable thumbs and two weeks before his twenty-seventh birthday. The picture was a relic from a lost place to which he would never return, from that Elysian time that had been rubbed out of his memory, from the endless summer, from the perpetual kiss of the warmth of the sun, from the frolic in the lush fields of future fame. He knew that he was now, at this moment, officially in the twilight of his youth.

2
    DARLO’S MOTHER, ANN ATCHISON , had helped found Dirty Darling and had performed in many of the company’s early films. She shouldn’t have been one of the big stars because she would only