She held his hand with supreme mercy and he shut his eyes for good.

42

“What are we doing here? We gonna try to crash the Playboy Mansion like ninth grade?”

Double Fry laughed, already standing at the door of the massive Tudor he grew up in as I hauled myself up the green slope and stopped to catch my breath. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, “before my mom comes back from her pro bono hustle.” He pulled the key from under the crumbling lawn jockey and opened the massive doors. “Home sweet home—not.”

The vestibule was cavernous, echoey. Fry’s parents had been super-successful entertainment lawyers—now the house was occupied by his widowed mom and her full-time housekeeper. Fry yelled, “Marta?” and when nobody answered he said, “Good, the coast is clear. Follow me.”

Fry, the black sheep in torn jeans, still kinda looked at one with all the opulence as he led me through the crystalline dining room into the den, across the shag carpet to a long, polished wooden stereo AM-FM record player-and-8-track cabinet with a full-on built-in bar stocked with winged corkscrew, ice bucket, Bombay Gin, Kahlua, Amaretto, and a long slim bottle of something Russian. He knelt and slid open the door, started flipping through the LPs—they looked like they hadn’t been touched in years—Perry Como, Bookends, Tijuana Brass, The Magic of Kauai.

I said, “Are we about to throw a luau?”

“Yeah, a psych-out luau.” Then he slid it out from the middle of the stack—the test pressing, lightly burnt, spotted, the dirty mad crazy beautiful relic.

Customer: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Title: DEL CYD

Comments: PIONEER RECORDS

Date: 11/14/83

I hadn’t seen it in weeks, and the sight of it filled me with too many emotions to register. Like the hole in the record, my whole world had spun around this thing.

“Thought you’d want this back.”

“I guess I gotta figure out who to give it to.”

“Right,” he said. “But maybe first let’s play it.”

“On this mammy-jammy?”

“Hell yeah.”

Fry laid the black wax on the record player and carefully placed the needle. Then he clicked the volume. With a soft crackle the opening chords of “Runaway Sunshine” came through the giant cabinet speakers, deeper, warmer, more elegant, more surreal than I’d heard them before.

I said, “This is how they would have sounded if it was really the sixties.”

Fry said, “It’s kinda badass—somebody should release this thing.” Then he flopped out on one of the big couches and I took the opposite—he started rolling a big funky-looking joint on the long glass table.

“I figure,” Fry said, “might as well honor them with a little ritual.”

“Won’t your mom have a heart attack when she comes home and finds us here?”

Fry shook his head. “This is her weed, dog.”

“Your mom’s a stoner?”

“Helps her sciatica.” Fry lit up. “Hey, what happened to the girl—the singer?”

“Endi?” I frowned. “We talked. She’s moving back home.”

“For real? So—no LA, no singing star?”

“She’s marrying her ex in August.”

“Wow, man, I’m…sorry to hear that—I thought she might convert you to actual grown-up. Hope she’s okay.”

He smoked, handed me the joint.

“Yeah, me too.” I shook my head and smoked and did a long shrug—the international male signal for I don’t want to talk about it. Good friend Double Fry took it in. I handed him back the joint and lay back and let the music play, washing over the sunlit, smoky room. The sweet hinky garagey clang of it held something else for me now—time and loss and the farawayness of Endi’s smile. Into the second song, stony Fry sat up and started wagging his hands like a doubting rabbi.

“So this…Jensen, Appelfeld, whatever—he, like, really wanted to replace Emil?”

“Yup.”

“Like, at every level.”

“Totally. The second he got out of the loony bin, he tracked down Charles Elkaim and started playing substitute son, cozying up. Anything to stand in Emil’s shoes.”

“Wow. Talk about holding a grudge.”

I nodded. “It was like, ‘You replace me? Oh no, I replace you.’ ”

“That is fucking sick,” Fry said. Then, out of the blue: “I gotta tell you, Addy, I never liked the guy.”

“Oh. Really? Now you offer me this insight?”

“No, serious, bro. That time we went to the movies? I couldn’t help but notice what a gloomster the guy was. The whole time, after you guys left, all through Yellow Submarine he was cursing under his breath, mumbling about ‘the arrogance.’ I’m all, like, the arrogance? It’s the Beatles, dude, it’s supposed to be fun.”

“Yeah, well, maybe next time share your hunches right away, okay?”

Fry laughed through closed teeth. “One thing I still don’t get. Just how long was that jerk even in The Daily Telegraph?”

“My guess is barely. Sandoz told me they auditioned a lot of guitarists that didn’t stick.”

“But he played actual shows with them, right?”

“One show—an amateur contest they lost. Soon as Cinnamon brought Emil around, they forgot all about Appelfeld.”

“But why’d he single out the drummer?”

“Well…the way I’m picturing it, Rey Durazo would have been especially vocal about kicking Appelfeld out—’cause he’s the one who would’ve most wanted a clean break.”

“Why?”

“The Perskys were just across the street from the rehearsal garage, right? He and Appelfeld had done some gardening work for Mrs. Persky. And she was sleeping with the both of them.”