He stared at the phone, dumbfounded. His hungover eyes did a little jiggle. He seemed to want to argue but then he said, “Got me.”
Then I read the caption out loud. “Daily Telegraph. D. Hawly—no e, they misspelled it—Mike Sandoz. Ricky Durazo, Jeff quote Groony unquote Grunes, B. Appelfeld? And no Emil,” I said. “Who the hell’s B. Appelfeld?”
Hawley Senior grabbed the phone and stared, morphing from cocky authority to self-questioning and finally pale bewilderment. Then he said, “I don’t know.”
“Maybe…they let a friend join ’em,” I mumbled.
He slammed the yearbook shut. “Or maybe it’s just some jackass who wanted to hold the guitar.”
From Hawley Senior’s, I headed for DTLA, the Sophia T. Salvin School for Special Education. Walking down the glossy hall, I passed a female teacher squatting on her knees, trying to soothe a crying child with green-blue paint on his palms. I stepped into the administrative office. The lady at the front desk told me I had to wait another twenty minutes for Mr. Grunes’s class to end. I had the perverse desire to ask her if she knew he was the former bassist for The Daily Telegraph, but I squashed it. When they finally called him in, he stopped in his tracks.
“Oh no, you gotta be kidding me, not you again. I haven’t even had a minute to eat my damn lunch, for Chrissake.”
“I won’t be long.”
“Yeah well, no visitors allowed in the teachers’ lounge.”
“So—can we go somewhere and talk?”
We hovered outside by his gray Prius under gray skies. While he ate a bologna sandwich and a bag of Pirate’s Booty out of a tin lunch box, I showed him the pic on my phone. I said, “Hamilton High battle of the bands. Probably ’82 or ’83.”
Grunes shot me a funny look and fished granny glasses from his pocket, leaned over and studied.
“Yup,” he said. “Winter Talent Show.”
“You remember it?”
“ ’Course I do—who loses an amateur contest and forgets?”
“Who’s this?”
He adjusted his glasses. “Not Emil?”
“No,” I said, “no, it’s not. The caption says B. Appelfeld. So far, I haven’t been able to track him down.”
“Appelfeld? B…B…oh shit, that’s Benji.”
“Who’s Benji?”
“Benjamin Appelfeld. Total nerd. Hawley was a dork, but Appelfeld was a supernerd—I think he rehearsed with us twice and maybe played two shows. Handsome guy, but…so awkward—definitely not, uh, rock star material, if you know what I mean.”
“You mean like…he couldn’t play?”
“Noooo, it wasn’t that so much. It was like…he just—” Grunes did a little shiver of disgust. “—he just telegraphed his neediness, you know what I mean? Like, every fucking second. I pride myself on being a tolerant person, I mean—it’s my job. But…I couldn’t stand the guy.”
“So what happened to him?”
Together we looked back to the photo—Sandoz in Jaggerpose on the mic, Mr. Cock of the Walk. Benjamin Appelfeld looked tame beside him—but there was something familiar in his eyes I couldn’t place. Or maybe it was a common expression—the fated.
“Man,” Grunes said, grabbing a kiddie-sized Tropicana from his tin. He poked the straw in the box and said, “We were hurtin’ bad after we lost—serious humiliation.”
He took a sip and then—“Oh shit, it’s all coming back to me now. Rey and Sandoz fired this guy. They told me about it. Bragged about it, really. How they were nervous—so of course they did like teenage boys do, right? They got stoned out of their minds. I think they maybe even dropped some acid. And they went over to Appelfeld’s—his parents’ place in the Palisades. They pull up, go past the white picket fence, lean on his door, like, on a Sunday afternoon and they’re all there, giggling, gassed out of their minds. Suddenly the door opens and Appelfeld’s dad answers. I remember this blew my mind, ’cause his dad was some kind of a heavy or something. Anyway, Benji is standing beside him, right? He knows what’s coming, but he plays it off like he doesn’t care. And Rey and Hawley’re stammering, all like, ‘Uh, well, uh, sorry, dude, but uh—you’re out of the band!’ Then they ran away like little petrified schoolboys laughing their heads off.”
“Not nice,” I said.
“Yeah, I know,” Grunes said, “but every band’s got one—the dissed and dismissed.”
I said, “Wow.”
“The Pete Best. Imagine being the guy who was almost in the Beatles.”
“I’d rather not,” I said. “But—who knew him, this Benji guy, where was he from?”
Grunes shrugged. “You know—I think he was actually down with Rey in the beginning. Like, they had a gardening business together or pool cleaning or something.”
My mind was racing. “Any idea where Appelfeld ended up?”
“Fuck if I know,” Grunes said, finishing off his bologna sandwich, tossing the wrapper in the tin box and slamming it shut. “Probably went to go work for UPS or some shit.”
I raced back to the marina, hopped on the boat.
Double Fry said, “You got something?”
“Crack the laptop.”
39
The facts—they fall like rain.
