He whispered. “She’d said we were a team. She called us…the hotness trio.”
Cinnamon took it in. “And…they cut you out.”
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he said with a whimper. “But Rey got belligerent, standing there naked. He pushed me, fuckin’ naked midget, thinking he was gonna become some kinda big—he pushed me.”
Appelfeld seized up and squinted like he’d just gotten pushed again—I tightened my grip on the hoodie but it was damn wet.
“I told Rey I knew all about the fancy producer and the big-time deal. And Rey was like, ‘You don’t know shit, dude.’ And they just…cracked up, both of them, they were laughing too. They wouldn’t stop. She was—so beautiful with the white sheet like a Greek goddess, and him standing there with his big old dong hanging out—they—I had to make it stop.”
Cinnamon and I exchanged a side glance—Appelfeld closed his eyes.
“I grabbed the lamp. I swung it—the…he just kind of staggered there for a second, blood all over his face. And I…I did it again.”
Now he opened his eyes and stared at her blankly, but there was remorse in there, way deep inside. And then it rose, burst in a torrent of hoarse tears.
“I killed our drummer,” he said, heaving with failing breath. “I destroyed the band.”
And it was so awkward, this final lie hanging onto the fantasy by its fingernails—my mouth parted to say something, maybe to correct him, but no words would come and there were sirens in the distance, getting closer—were they for us? Time was turning to floating particles in the green light under crumbling cities and Appelfeld was letting go, not just of the past but the present, fading to permanent and stationary sleep—yet something kept him from completing the journey; he was caught on a snag. Hand trembling, he reached for the drawstring on Cinnamon’s parka, but gentle. He had one last confession to make.
“I…hated his guts. Just—” But he could not complete the thought.
“Rey-Rey?” Cinnamon asked, with strained compassion.
He shook his head a little.
“Emil?”
“Mm-mm.”
“Devvy?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head once hard, eyes going wide, twisting up with the last of his powers. “My dad. Fucking loser. Complaining day and night about how the world did him wrong. How he was so great and he had fallen so far. Like just being our dad was such a disappointment, such a fucking punishment. I just…”
Now Appelfeld looked right through her—maybe to white light. Then he said, “But he was a star. To me, I mean. He was the star.”
Their eyes locked in curious understanding. I clutched the blood-soaked cloth as if I was the one hanging on for dear life. Appelfeld smiled with a trembling hurt deeper than any gunshot.
“And I wanted to save him. So bad. Like, if I could be a part of the band, I could be a real star, and then…he would be a real star too.” And then Benjamin Appelfeld took one last look at Cinnamon, and, as if to explain everything, he mumbled, “My dad.”
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.”
