Her smile made all the bad burn away like sun through morning fog.
“I’m sorry to bother,” I said. “Any chance I can steal another hour in the living room? I want to rip a copy of this thing.”
She looked over her shoulder. “Sure, why not? Go for it.”
“I won’t be long—scout’s honor.”
She watched as I fumbled at the couch with the cables.
“How’ve you been?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Good question. I’m not even sure. This town is intense.”
“How long have you been here?”
“In LA? Just three months. I guess I’m still getting used to the place.”
“Nobody ever gets used to this place,” I said, and she laughed.
“You find out anything more for your article?”
“My article?”
“About the mystery band.”
I paused for a beat. I couldn’t remember why I’d lied, but now I had to stick with it. “I heard the bassist became a schoolteacher,” I said. “I’m trying to track him down.”
“Wow, well, good luck. What a fun assignment.”
She split for her bedroom and closed the door. I sat at the end of the couch with the laptop beside me, burning one long, slightly scratchy MP3 on Audacity, then I sliced and tagged the files with patient wonder, all the while marking up the insert.
DEL CYD / The Daily Telegraph, 1983 (Pioneer Records, unreleased)
SIDE ONE
Runaway Sunshine 3:41
Fair-Weather Freaks 3:05
Polka Dot Princess 4:51
Launch the Lightning 2:50
A Thousand Shadows 4:28 <—Seeds cover
SIDE TWO
Auguries of Innocence 0:55
Sea Green Shanty 18:33
Mickey Sandoz—Lead Vocals
Emil Elkaim—Lead Guitar
Jeff Grunes—Bass Guitar, Vocals
Devon Hawley Jr.—Keyboards, Vocals
Reynaldo “Rey-Rey” Durazo—Drums
Produced by Lazar “Lazerbeam” Lawrence
Engineered by Martin Anawalt
Recorded November 11–13, 1983, at RainBo Records, Santa Monica
This time around, after seeing Hawley in his final hour, the sunshiny blue melodies played more sorrowful, the last flash of innocence from the island of doomed teenage boys.
You’re not ready for the night when I—
Launch the lightnin’!
Launch the lightnin’!
Light UP the sky!
Fight fire with fire!
And don’t ask why!
For all their plugged-in electricity, they were human-sized, and it brought back Hawley’s strange remark in the interview, about moments of solitude in the big city. A dazed feeling came over me, like someone straining to hear the ocean in a seashell. My heart pulled to know him, to know why someone had it in them to—
Endi cut my reverie, moving through the living room quickly to hand me a yellow flyer—Angela Elsworth at Van Gogh’s Ear It’s Free (2 drink minimum)—with a little cropped photo of her strumming the guitar.
A big smile spread across my face.
“Wait a minute—this is you?”
“Next Friday.” She shrugged. “It’s just an amateur hour thing. Only if you’re not busy.”
“Oh, I’m there, are you kidding? Nice stage name.”
“It’s my…counter-persona or something,” she said with a deadpan smile. “I’m doin’ this undercover.”
I thanked her for the flyer and did not tell her that I’d just seen a man die the night before. Then I made my way back to the car with a freshly burned CD—it lit up the car stereo as I considered heading for Southwest College. I’d been taking a certification course in private investigation—today was Intro to Data Mining—but after the night I’d had, another lecture on workers’ compensation fraud just seemed a little inconsequential. Plus, I had a paper due in two weeks—how to establish probable cause in order to file for a search warrant—and I hadn’t even started the research. Trying to motivate, I pulled into Mobil to fill her up when a college girl at the next pump turned her baseball cap backward, exposing the letters UCLA in gold on blue.
That gave me an idea. Madame Persky had mentioned that Rey Durazo’s cousin was a UCLA professor. A quick phone search told me Professor Socorro Durazo, PhD, taught “How to Read How to Read Donald Duck,” for the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. From the online syllabus, I picked up the gist: Professor Durazo’s class takes a close look at the legendary 1971 essay by Mattleart and Dorfman exploring Disney’s anti-communist propaganda in the form of pro-capitalist comic books, distributed throughout greater Latin America. It was Donald Duck as mindfuck indoctrination and political child abuse, pure evil. As luck would have it, class started 4:00 p.m., Haines 39.
