“Honey—can I just have the damn key?”

“Listen,” I said, trying to ameliorate. “I would certainly pay to see some Daily Telegraph stuff…”

He wasn’t paying any attention to me. “Angel, I can’t charge this young dude—he’s trying to help relatives of one of the victims. Wouldn’t be right.”

She rolled her eyes. As she fished for the enormous keychain hooked to her hanging purse on the wall, she talked to herself, maybe for my benefit. “A goddamn second rent I’ve got to shell out to store his crap. This isn’t punk rock, it’s plunk rock.”

When she gave him the key, he went sheepish and considered it like it was a foreign object. “Sweetie, what do I got back there anyway?”

“Well,” she said, seething like an impatient babysitter, “you’ve probably got the cover art, for starts. And I think you have some flyers.”

“That’s right, that’s right,” he mumbled. “But no tapes.”

“Hawley’s got the tapes,” she said.

I perked up. “Hawley?”

He said, “Dev Hawley, the keyboardist. Nice guy but he’s a little scattered.”

“He’s a little scattered?” she said.

Larry the Lazerbeam waved her off, grabbed a yellow pack of American Spirits off the clamorous coffee table and shook out a cigarette. Then he walked out the front door, leaving me alone with Persephone of the Trailer Court.

8

Devon Hawley did know Emil. They were in a band together.

How could Charles Elkaim not know that?

“I’m Marie, by the way,” Lazerbeam’s wife said, but she didn’t give me a second look, and when I said, “I appreciate you guys having me over,” she just nodded and retreated to the kitchenette to restack dishes in silence, as if her rage was useless without her husband in the room, and so there was nothing left to say.

From nerves, I grabbed a mag with a blonde shaving her foamy face on the cover and pretended to browse, but I watched Marie in glances, trying not to be obvious. Under the seething was something else; there always is. She was gravely disappointed, stunned even, to find herself in this aluminum half-a-home. Maybe she shared Lazerbeam’s passion for the sixties revival, or at least maybe she understood it—once. But I bet she always knew they were running against the grain of time, and maybe she secretly hated that she let herself get dragged along.

I didn’t think she was all wrong, didn’t see what all this hyper-nostalgia could amount to.

On the mantel was a framed photo—I put down the mag and stood off the couch to take a closer look. It was the two of them, high school aged, in front of a fake night-sky backdrop.

“Is this you?” I asked.

“That’s our prom picture,” she said with a trace of sadness. “As you can see, we’d already gotten the bug.”

In the gold-framed photo, Marie was wearing a fancy white wedding dress that had been hemmed into a tight miniskirt, showing off her sexy, plump curves. Her heavy Egyptian eye makeup was right out of Swingin’ Roma, Fellini a-go-go. Lazer was skinny then, without a whisker on his chin, cocky in a satin top hat, white tie, and corny velvet tails, with a bright multicolored scarf for a belt. Together, they looked sassy, sophisticated, maybe too sophisticated for high school kids.

I sat back down, checked my watch—2:25. In a few hours I’d be meeting Devon Hawley—the keyboardist.

Finally, Lazerbeam came back, jolly, bedraggled, cigarette butt dangling from his lip, with an armful of old poster boards and a big stack of flyers and some xeroxed and stapled fanzines and a VHS box. Smoke was pouring off his curly gray head as he spread his finds all out across the coffee table, hacking and winded. He dropped the butt into a blue water glass and it fizzed out in an instant.

“I found it,” he said, singsongy.

“Found what?” his wife said, standing in the bedroom doorway.

“Some won-derful stuff!” It was hard to believe this bearded old man and his torqued posture was the kid in the prom shot, but the enthusiasm was the same. He reached for the VHS and held it like a trophy. “Right here—the Seeds on Shebang! And I was there, man, eight years old!”

“Oh Jesus, Larry, he doesn’t need to see that.”

“Now hold on a minute, woman,” he said—his first act of open defiance. “I’m trying to give this guy context. Daily Telegraph covered ‘A Thousand Shadows’ by the Seeds—why? ’Cause I suggested it. And you know why I suggested it? ’Cause I saw the original taping when they premiered it on Shebang, 1967. My daddy booked every dancer on that show!”

“For fuck’s sake, Larry, the VHS player doesn’t even work.”

“The hell it doesn’t.” He dropped to his knees and crawled behind the TV, started wrangling with cords. “Incredible clip! You do need to see this.”

As he fiddled, I said, “What is it I’m going to see exactly?”

“Maybe the greatest moment in all of human history. It was like American Bandstand, only insteada Dick Clark, the host was Casey Kasem. I turned the ’Graph onto this track, man!”

His wife groaned. “You should probably get a Nobel Prize for that.”

He ignored her, scrambled for the black slab of plastic and clutched it like a prayer book. “Fasten your seatbelts, my dearies.”

I said, “Don’t undersell it,” and Marie gave a snort.

He said, “Douse the Edisons, babe.”

Marie reluctantly drew the little yellow window curtains and turned off the lamp on the couch-side table. All I could see was the foothill of his crooked back now as he slid the VHS in. He mumbled, “Machine better not eat my tape.” Then he stood and thumbed at two remotes like a gunslinger.

With a click, the widescreen went navy blue. Primitive digital titles appeared:

SHEBANG! dancers / Seeds “A Thousand Shadows” U.S.

CBS-TV NETWORK, May 11, 1967.

Straight to Kasem, bearded, talking to a group of teenagers. “…new record is called ‘A Thousand Shadows’ and it’s done by the Seeds.”

Music: a hammy church organ and a whispering melodramatic singer—“I did it all for her, my flower child…” And then:

Lost in your dreams!

Said the ride’s so long and the night’s so black

A thousand shadows can never look back

As the song kicked in, the dancers boogied in couples around a set that was really nothing, but it was a futuristic nothing: long rows of blinking multicolored orbs and a staggered stage designed to look like the rec room on the Starship Enterprise. The screen zoomed into a primitive double-exposure showing, at the same time, a smallish crowd of teenybopper dancers, and superimposed before them, one highlighted couple, strictly from Squaresville. The boy was a long and lean varsity type in a suit with a blond comb-over and the girl was cheery, straight-blonde, miniskirted, with a big, embarrassed smile. Their left hands were joined, like fox-trotters fallen from an earlier era. In fact, most of the high school–age crowd behind them looked square, suited, restrained. Hair was long in front but not long-long; dance moves were more enthusiastic than erotic. This wasn’t the nudies having a freakout at Woodstock a few years later. These were “the good kids”—could’ve been a Catholic school cotillion.

Three minutes—it zoomed by, but I was getting restless with the history lesson.

“Kind of like something out of a Tarantino flick,” I said.

“Yeah, but this was real,” Lazerbeam said, with a little too much rancor. “Maybe we better watch one more time, so you can really understand what the ’Graph was trying to be.”