Fry said, “That’s what swingers and hipsters want to know, daddy-o.” He was staring at me with that terrible glint in his eye.
“You can’t just show up at a place like that,” I said. “They’ll throw up the gate.”
“Well, if you show up and say, ‘Hi I’m investigating a murder,’ they might. But there are other ways.”
“Such as?”
He swooped up the cell phone.
“Freiburger,” I said, “whatever you’re about to do, please don’t. I’ve had enough shockers for the week.”
He raised a shushing finger.
“Yeah, hi, is this the retirement village in Laguna?” He turned his back to me. “Great—my name is Adam. I have kind of a…situation. You see, my uncle Marty’s a newish resident there, and he asked me to come down tomorrow, but he isn’t great with a phone and he forgot to tell me his unit.”
When Fry signed off, his eyebrows did a little Groucho Marx wiggle of triumph. “Uncle Marty’s expecting you tomorrow at noon.”
At the wheel, driving home, I was still marveling at teenage scenemaker Marjorie and how her sweet daughter Cinnamon seemed to have picked up the baton, only to discover it was a lit stick of dynamite. That’s when I suddenly remembered Endi’s amateur hour gig. I pulled over and got the folded yellow flyer out of my glove box. Van Gogh’s Ear, 8pm—my watch said it was already quarter past, but I was only ten minutes away.
19
The joint was a gutted bait-and-tackle shop on the Strand in Venice, more like a coffeehouse than a nightclub, but it was jam-packed, with a tiny stage about three inches off the ground. It was dark in there, and Endi was nowhere to be seen as I maneuvered through the crowd to the last empty seat, trying to be inconspicuous. Onstage, an undernourished college guy in a mustard-colored beanie was lecturing the crowd. “Just a reminder—you get three minutes total. It’s not much so let’s give everybody a chance, okay?”
The audience groaned in unison like students who just received news of a test. I looked over my shoulder. Still no Endi.
Personally, though, I got the guy’s point. Three minutes was high pressure, and the comics and singers and skit teams came and went faster than you could hate ’em. The first guy sang a Billie Eilish song I didn’t know, then a straitlaced comic did a rant about the Dutch and their wooden clogs, then the next guy cracked jokes about the perils of being a Black ski instructor, then a crazy-eyed young woman merely chanted, “You are not my people, you are not my people” over and over again, pointing at the audience—strangely enough, she got laughs. And then, from the dark, Angela Elsworth, aka Endi Sandell, tripped onto the stage, guitar in hand.
She was transformed from demure lodger into a vision in an antique-sage velvet wrap dress with a yellow carnation in her hair, quick-tuning her guitar with a slightly nervous look in her big eyes. She said, “This is a Sarah McLachlan song” and then she started playing, singing quietly, beyond intense, like having a stranger whisper in your ear. I tried to be cool but I was transfixed. Ruh roh, I was flippin’, even harder than I had already flipped. Because there was something extra about her onstage—magnetic and mysterious. What she lacked in confidence, she made up for in just being open about it, this stranger so far from home. My ex was a singer too, a songwriter and a performer, but so different in every way. Kerrylyn was born to take the stage, she couldn’t hide it, whereas Endi was tentative up there, clutching a reluctant inner something that peeked out at the world. But it drew you in, drew me in, the whole room. The song ended, she opened her eyes. A moment of silence, then big cheers, and she smiled. Stepping off the stage into their applause, she was blushing, nervously pulling the flower from her hair. Halfway through the next act, I craned my neck, searched the place for her—she was just outside the door, talking to some friends. I got up and went out to join them. At the sight of me, she made a big gesture.
“You’re here!”
I said, “That was…wow.”
“You liar, I was a mess.” Her color was still high.
“No way,” one of her entourage said. “They loved you.”
“I did too,” I chimed in, overeager—one of her girlfriends raised a curious eyebrow.
“We’re going down the street for a drink. You should join.”
“Oh, that’s okay, I’m just—”
“No,” she said, “join us.” She rattled off the names of her pals.
“How do you know all these people? You just got here?”
“These are Yael’s friends. She forced them to be here. Adam is writing an article on this strange, obscure rock band—all they left behind was this amazing test pressing.”
“What were they called?” asked the blond guy with the baby face.
“The Daily Telegraph,” I said.
“Never heard of them.”
“That’s the point,” said Endi. “Nobody did.”
Half-reluctant, I ambled along with the pack—Endi, blond Cliff, a dreadlocked guy named Eric who claimed to have participated in some kind of Wu Tang Clan remix project, curly-haired Yael, a tall skinny poet named Pablo, a real stunner named Onnalisa “with an O,” and two others whose names I didn’t catch. We went to the Lincoln and took the long table. I nursed a Scotch at the far end and listened to the banter, a little out of place but enjoying it. Cliff had auditioned for a horror movie that morning and described what it was like to scream at a video camera in a brightly lit room. Yael and Endi both went to the social work program at Cornell together. Eric gave a soliloquy on how he’d produce Endi if given the chance, gesticulating a big screen—“What you need is to bring the elegant—horns, strings. No, I’m serious, shine a big light on what’s already there.” They were a little younger than me, this gang, Endi too—that hadn’t quite dawned on me before. They were chatty and ebullient and all of life for them, it seemed, resided somewhere in the not-very-distant future. Except for Pablo, none of them had grown up in Los Angeles. They were the fresh and the hopeful, and every year brought a new wave of them, rolling in like seaweed on the Venice tide. They laughed, they ribbed, they flirted, humble-bragged and concocted capital P Plans for the lives they yearned for, but a silent question hovered over them, as untouchable yet as present as the fluorescent lights that flickered through the colored bottles along the bar: Who will make it here—and who will not.
For some, the dream was a child’s secret hunger, born in the wrench of being outside, unwanted.
For others, it was just the natural move, quote unquote—they’d been born with gifts, they were sure of it, people told them so, and it would be a modern kind of sin not to go for it.
For some, though, the dream was a way station for the soul—they were lost or maybe never found their way and needed a buoy to cling to until the waters of life settled.
I watched Endi, holding back my crush, trying not to stare, wondering which kind of dreamer she was. She had too much inner life, too much ambivalence or too much dissonance or too much something to end up as the B-girl on a sitcom or in some career dotted by music videos. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, but that too much of something—there’s no word for it—could go either way in Hollywood. A protective surge came over me watching her laugh with her friends, and I had to remind myself that I was just an aging fool who should probably keep his mouth shut—what did I ever know except the jangling clanging music of failure?
Nevertheless, I still had Endi’s funny, reticent spirit on my mind driving home, humming the song she’d sung. It was just before midnight when I got to my studio apartment and cut up the stairs and into the hallway. Then I stopped in my tracks. My door was wide open. I didn’t always lock it, but I usually at least closed it to hide the mess. I stepped in carefully. At a glance nothing was different, but it was like I could tell someone had been there.
I itemized—keyboard, microwave, hot plate, mini-fridge, the old boom box and the ancient iPod, rack of clothes, sneakers, all the worldly possessions. Far as I could see, nothing was missing.
“Yo.” My landlord, Mr. Santiago, startled me at the door.
“Somebody come in here?” I said.
“Guy came by—said you borrowed one of his LPs.”
“A guy? What kind of guy?”
