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.
Cinnamon—linking a half-dozen hearts, the vortex in a paisley minidress.
Cinnamon—beckoning siren to desperadoes, dreams up in smoke.
Benjamin Appelfeld: Diagnosed, re-diagnosed, re-re-diagnosed.
The patient has a florid psychotic process involving either carelessness with language or bizarre preoccupations. Although he has resisted intervention, further psychiatric medication with monitoring is recommended at this time.
Like Hawley Junior, he’d collapsed under the weight of teenage loss.
Unlike Hawley Junior, he had no model to build, no counter-dream to save him.
A teenager ungrown, desperate and lost in the city of the mind.
Could this three-time loser be the psycho hot on my trail?
And what did he want from the LP—a record he probably didn’t even play on?
I circled back to the facts.
Someone named Benjamin Appelfeld played a high school battle of the bands with a group called The Daily Telegraph—then he got kicked out—it happens.
Drummer Rey-Rey and his gardening partner…could’ve been having a fling with Marjorie Persky.
Emil / Hawley / Grunes made a demo with Bahari—drummer Rey and singer Sandoz never even heard about it.
Then Rey-Rey got brained and tossed in the bushes behind the Perskys’ garage.
Emil was accused—and killed in jail.
Cinnamon ran off, faked her own suicide.
Meanwhile: Appelfeld, the mystery man, in and out of institutions, a “lost cause,” a caseload—the replaced one, the unwanted.
Who…didn’t make the cut.
But would he rubberneck the band forever and ever?
Of course he would.
