“Think about it, Addy. From an official POV, it does sound crazy. Forty years ago, some nothing rock band—so what? The grown-ups are looking for motive and means, right here, right now. And even if Sanderson was a viable suspect, the cops are not going to be happy about you meddling. Like everybody else on this planet, they got I-me-mine fever.” Then he started singing: “All through the day—”
“Please don’t. And if they aren’t gonna look into it, I am. I gotta talk to this Sanderson guy.”
“Dude, I don’t advise that at all—he sounds like a total jackass.”
“I’m not going to go shoot meth with him, I just want to meet him.”
“With what protection? Addy—this is a hardened criminal.”
“Fry, I cannot go chickenshit now,” I said. “I cannot be the king of jumping ship once again. I’m looking into Emil’s band. And you don’t know a band till you’ve met the lead singer.”
“I’m not joking; you need to exercise some caution here.”
Silence.
Then: “Let’s go together—I’ll look into hiring some security to accompany us.”
“Security. Yeah, that’ll really encourage the guy to open up.”
“Adam, you’re not thinking straight on this. Once again, you’ve got ants in the pants. I mean, really—you can just picture Officer Lanterman.”
Fry went into his hyper-rigid authority figure voice. “Who gives a flying fuck about some crappy unknown garage band from a million years ago that could barely play and never even put out a record?”
I looked out past the grass, the graves, the freeway under streaking skies.
“I do.”
“Well,” Fry said, sounding exasperated, “then don’t be reckless about it. The sun’s about to set. Come by in the morning, we’ll go at rush hour. Together. Okay?”
I grumbled and we signed off. Back in the car, I headed into the city and worked a shift—Torrance to LAX, LAX to Burton Way, Doheny up to Santa Monica, then down to Third. The customers came and went—long, fat, short, tall, talky, morose, hurried, drowsy, seatbelted into a low mood or gazing out the window looking for something nobody could find. All the while, I played The Daily Telegraph low on the car stereo and nobody complained. Some songs were already stepping out, announcing themselves. “Fair-Weather Freaks” when the blistering guitar solo kicked in, played wavy and stiff all at once, like you could hear Emil’s vision outracing his fingers in real time. And “Polka Dot Princess”—pretty, breezy, music for a teenage kiss. It made me think of Cinnamon buried alongside her true love. Also, the crazy opener of side two—“Auguries of Innocence,” William Blake recited like a TV horror movie host with the voice going from left channel to right and back again against wind chimes, wide open sound, building and falling like the surf.
They were specious, elliptical, goofy, fake erudite, hypercharged. They were teenagers.
To see the world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour!
Then the goofy spoken word segued into the last number, the long one—
Swords are drawn
As you walk the plank
you’re through
The sirens are singing
a sea green shanty
for you
’Cause your shiiiiiip…
…has sailed!
This corny, creaky record—I was hooked.
Things slowed down after the dinner rush, and I was only blocks away from Ohio Ave under the 405, so I drove there, just to see. No harm in seeing. The freeway columns were graffiti’d in up-slanted black.
EVERYTHING
YOU
WANT
IS
HERE
I drove right past the village of ratty tents that covered both sides. The place was busy enough, like a Yosemite campground as the fires dwindle. I parked up the street, heart thumping. I didn’t like the idea of dragging Fry into this—it wasn’t his gig and it wasn’t his problem. In a split decision, I cracked my wallet, put the big bills in the glove box, shoved the rest in my pocket, and hoofed it back into homelessland, dry Santa Anas blowing through the underpass at 11:00 p.m., the delta of LA night.
15
At the lip of the underpass, bicycle parts were piled high alongside shopping carts sitting in dark metal solitude, far from home, overflowing with trash like cornucopias from hell. I walked wide of the metal, ducked and passed through a kind of cardboard portal with nervous unease, thrust suddenly into their skinny homemade alley, faces hijacking, flashes of eye light, low ghetto blaster bleeding into mind window, a street poem of faces signaling danger, voices in midnight negotiation:
