Fry said, “Formerly owned a home on Bowling Green Way in the Palisades.”
“Right,” I said. “The bassist’s story sticks.”
“We got the father but meanwhile, where’s the son?”
Young Benji left a spare digital trail. Agitated, Fry hacked into a database of old Cedars-Sinai medical records—bizarre and grim. B. Appelfeld coughed up 148 entries. At the bottom of the list, a 4,078-page PDF including endless doctors’ reports and a court deposition dated March 14, 1993, whose main objective seemed to be to substantiate that Benjamin Appelfeld ought to be entitled to receive live-in status at a county-funded mental health institution. Fry scrolled the monster mess of scanned xeroxes.
It made for a hell of a biography.
“Age nineteen,” I said. “That’s maybe two years after getting kicked out of The Daily Telegraph. What is it?”
“Looks like a note from a dental clinic on Wilshire stating that ‘the patient will require taxi service following wisdom tooth extraction x4. Mother cannot attend this Thurs. aft.’
“That’s…not fatal.”
But nine months and four teeth later, Benjamin Appelfeld checked into the Fielding Clinic on Venice Boulevard following a botched suicide attempt: wrists had been slashed “incorrectly,” Thorazine administered.
“I didn’t know Thorazine was still around then,” Fry said. “But look at the warning—potentially serious side effects, including swelling, weight gain, blurred vision, and impotence. Patient must be withdrawn slowly.”
“This pill may prevent or cause suicide—good luck,” I said.
Fry kept reading: “Dr. Simpson notes that patient is diagnosed with severe anxiety, paranoia, depressive symptoms; six months treatment of cognitive behavioral therapy is indicated.”
“Looks like that was his first full-scale mental health diagnosis.”
“First of many.”
We kept reading. For the next ten years, Appelfeld was in and out of institutions, programs, and halfway houses, on and off a dozen different meds, and in and out of one-on-one and group therapies. He was a “cure junkie”—his rap sheet read like a walking history of twentieth-century psych: Gestalt, Primal Scream, cognitive-behavioral, existential-humanistic, sensory deprivation, and EMDR—he tried it all. But always, the final decree—Patient reports that symptoms of extreme anxiety and depression have persisted.
Fry: “Dude was a mess.”
By page 1,367 of docs dating from 1998-ish, the suicide attempts seem to have decreased—he had learned to check himself in fast. In a Panel Qualified Medical Evaluation in the Field of Psychiatry dated June 19, 1999, Dr. Fakir Darshakian of Valley Village Medical declared the applicant “permanent and stationary”—i.e., without chance of improvement—with a whole person impairment rating of 23 percent, indicating moderate but recurring and unabated depression, anxiety, and paranoia “not due to PTSD.” “The applicant appears quite dysphoric,” Dr. Darshakian wrote in the conclusions section of his report. “He seems to have great difficulty securing and keeping gainful employment and is requesting that he be put on suicide watch despite no present suicidal ideation.”
Page after page, the suffering, the cry for help, the dismissal, like a merry-go-round from hell. Appelfeld’s address changed, but he stayed in a tight circumference—Culver City to Mar Vista to Playa Vista to Leimert Park—never moving east of La Cienega. He moved a lot, though. Benjamin Appelfeld was lost in place.
Fry scoured records, page by page, on and on, redundant, cataloging and rehashing the same old miseries over and over and over.
I said, “This shit is numbing.”
Fry said, “So imagine what the actual life was like—wait, look at this—”
A progress report from psychologist Dr. Mort Schulman of the bizarrely named Acute Care Mental Health Facilities, dated October 1, 1998. “Patient states that he is ‘still carrying a torch for a high school sweetheart who betrayed him and got him kicked out of his rock band.’ ”
One little line, smack dab in the middle of babble mountain.
I read and reread that line ten times, my heart thumping.
Cinnamon never mentioned him, Sandoz never mentioned him, Grunes barely remembered him, but he nailed the salient fact: he was the hidden secret of every rock group that ever lived, The Guy That Got The Boot, the one that didn’t make the cut.
Fry said, “You think he was really Cinnamon’s guy?”
“No idea, but if he even thought he was, then she fell hard for Emil and rearranged the band all in one fell swoop—he must have really bad tripped.”
We scrolled on, through endless fragilities, endless gripes, but by century’s end, the records came to a dead stop.
B. Appelfeld did a stint working for Apple Temps—he was employed briefly by Nestle Corp in Glendale for a six-week engagement in the pet food department—and then, as if by some digital sleight of hand, he disappeared into thin air.
No obits, no records, no work history, no addresses, no nothing.
The fucker ghosted.
I air-dropped the yearbook photo and Fry opened it full screen. We stared at the washed-out image like two lunatics in a séance. Black pixels, Nice Guy with an uneasy smile, a scuffed white Stratocaster strapped around his shoulder, standing behind hunched Sandoz hanging on the mic.
To break the trance, Fry said, “1999.”
“End of the century.”
“Yeah but—the dad stopped doing his little cameos around the same time, November ’99. Maybe there’s a connection—Pops took a caregiver role?”
“Or a disavowal and Benji pulled a name change?”
“Or…else he died. But there’s no record. Look—all we know is one way or another Benjamin Appelfeld disappeared, poof—gone.”
Howard the cat strutted right across the laptop and looked at us, dead serious.
“He wants milk. I’ll get you your milk, ya noodnik.”
Fry got up, but I sat there transfixed, made dizzy by a wound—someone else’s.
The spirit of Benjamin Appelfeld had invaded me—sorrowful, meandering, and so, so vulnerable.
And angry.
Very.
The father: a star. Ish.
The son: a rock-and-roll guitar-slinger. Almost.
Unfinished Hollywood business.
One lousy high school contest—he loses, gets dumped, the music, the inner music, the music of daily life comes to a crashing halt, and now he’s turned loose out into the unforgiving world—the Big, Wide World—lost in the city maze, shadowed by that old devil, Daddy’s dreams.
Fathers and sons.
Your ship…has sailed!
And…so has love—teen romance—it slipped through his fingers.
