“Not true,” he protested. “A deal was discussed.”
“These days he can’t even remember how I taught him to stack the dishes.”
He breathed in her venom, his cheeks rosy but his eyes tired with the strain of tolerance. In a slightly lower register, he said, “I’m not saying we were the only game in town, okay. A lot was going on. But we did discover some great acts and The Daily Telegraph was definitely one of them.”
“Discover?!” She held a piece of orange Tupperware like a weapon. “What did you discover? You attended. You were on the outside, Larry, just dying to worm your way in.”
He frowned. “I’m just trying to paint a picture for this young gentleman, okay. You don’t have to be so hostile about it.”
“Larry likes to make it a big mythological thing,” she said. “The golden age! Let me tell you, I was there. Yeah, it was fun. But it was small-time.”
He pulled the joint from his pocket, but it was too smushed and minuscule to relight. “Anyway,” he said, “one man’s small is another man’s glorious.”
“Ha! So small is glorious?” She stepped into the slim door space that separated the mini-living room from the mini-kitchen. “Look where we live, asshole. Is this what you call glorious?”
He shrugged, cowered. Yet, it was a nonplussed kind of cowering, rebellious to the core. They’d had this argument before, maybe 365 times a year. The really uncomfortable one was me, the rope in their tug-of-war.
He turned to me. “Big, small, whatever. To me, the paisley underground was the greatest thing that ever happened to American culture. And The Daily Telegraph were it, man. The best. When the scene was over, I…I almost had like a version of PTSD, you know what I mean? Not from the LSD or anything. But once you’ve, like, been a part of the music, really shared that incredible magic dream, man, civilian life just…seems kinda crazy.”
“Good excuse, Lar,” she said with a snort. Then, to me: “Anyway, just so you get your facts straight, Pioneer put out three damn records. The Cherry Pops, The Cave Ghouls, and Billy Byron. All flops. And The Daily Telegraph didn’t exactly make the news either, no pun intended.”
“But Emil did make the news,” I said softly, careful not to fan her flames.
“Yeah, well,” she said, backing down. “That was horrible. And I don’t think he did it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
But she didn’t answer.
Lazerbeam said, “Whole thing was a fuckin’ shame.”
Husband and wife exchanged a dark glance. For the first time, they were both quiet, allies. Lazer got up to open the metal door and air the place out.
I said, “You wouldn’t happen to have any, like, memorabilia from that time?”
“You kidding?” he said. “I got all kindsa shit. Baby, you got the key to next door?”
“He has so much crap, I have to rent a second trailer,” she said. Then she turned to him in a terse whisper. “Why don’t you charge this character for your time. If you’re such a font of valuable information…archival research fee?”
“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.
