The Five (40 page)

But something Terry had said out under the eucalyptus tree had made her heart sink:
I
don’t know what you guys are planning to do, whether or not you’ll keep the name and soldier on with some new faces.

Three could not be Five. Changes were coming. If two new players came in, the chemistry would be altered. If it didn’t work, John might even decide to join another band. After all, this was a business. Wasn’t it? Berke might split and go her own way. A business, that’s what it was. Not really a family, after all.

She thought she should be considering what to keep and what to leave behind, because this life was never easy.

After his statement to Ariel, Nomad put down his spoon and very gingerly touched the piece of puff pastry that seemed stuck to his face with searing hot Super-Glue. “Maybe you should stretch your acoustic set out tonight. Do two or three extra songs. Since this is such an acoustic crowd.”

The Casbah, on the corner of Laurel Street and Kettner Boulevard in Little Italy, was one of their favorite venues. The music room was small and the club sat under the noisy flight path of aircraft in and out of San Diego International, but it was a fun and friendly place and in the three times they’d played there the reception had always been stellar. One thing Ariel particularly liked is that her acoustic set, usually a couple of quiet songs delivered soon after Berke’s drum solo, went over well at the Casbah. The audience really paid attention unlike at a lot of other clubs where the cry was for louder and louder. “Sure,” Ariel said, pleased at this suggestion. “I’d be glad to.”

A cellphone’s ring tone burbled a couple of bars of The Clash’s ‘London Calling’. Chappie checked the incoming number, which she didn’t recognize, and then she answered, “Hello?” She listened for a few seconds, as Terry walked over to stick his nose into the crockpot’s aroma. “Any of you guys know a DJ Talk It Up?” Chappie asked with the phone at her ear. “From Rock The Net?
Pardon
?” She was speaking to the caller. Then, to her houseguests again: “Rock
Da
Net.”

“
Fuck
, no,” said Nomad, his gentlemanly demeanor over and done.

“He wants to talk to
you
.” Chappie held the phone toward Ariel.

“Me? No, I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to anyone,” Chappie told DJ Talk It Up. “That’s right. Okay, I’ll let them know. Uh huh. Listen, how did you get this number?” Evidently that question was not to be answered, because Chappie put the cell down and said, “I guess they’ve found you. Mr. Allen told me they might. Anyway, DJ says to tell you he does a podcast from Los Angeles. He says to check out his website. Rock Da Net.” She couldn’t hold back a grin. “Have you ever heard anything so fucking lame?”

“Got that right,” Nomad said, aiming his spoon in what he hoped was the vicinity of his mouth.

“Says he’ll be at sound check today and would like to do an interview. Get ready for it. That place is going to be crawling with media. But that’s what you want, right?”

No one replied. Because Nomad was the emperor, sometimes his thoughts exactly mirrored those of his subjects, and that was now the case. He was thinking, as they all were, that success—if it meant acceptance, or fame, or money, or revenge on those who looked down on you as if you’d just crawled out of a gutter—was not worth the death and injury of two bandmates. All those things would be great, the dream of every working band, but this price tag was way too steep.

“What I want,” said Berke, and she let that hang for a few seconds before she finished it, “is to get this over with.” She turned her haggard face toward her mother. “The boxes.”

Chappie left the kitchen and came back with an envelope. She put it down on the table next to Berke’s coffee cup. Written in block letters on the front was
Berke—Open The Boxes
First
. The word
First
was underlined.

“They’re waiting for you,” Chappie said, her voice betraying no emotion.

Berke took the envelope. She stood up and headed for the back door. She was wearing her running shoes without socks. When she realized nobody was following, she said with forced and farcical cheer, “Come on! Let’s make it a party!”

It was a small free-standing garage whose contents, Berke knew, had gradually choked off enough room for a car. When Chappie unlatched the door and pulled it open, the odor that rolled out was not of old oil and grease but instead of old library stacks. Sunlight had already revealed the dozens of boxes, the precariously-leaning metal shelves jammed full of books and the layers of newspapers and magazines that stood everywhere, but Chappie switched on an overhead light to complete the illumination.

Berke looked around, with her mother at her side and her bandmates behind her. Floyd fucking Fisk had really laid his crap heavy in this hole, she thought. It was a paradise for cockroaches and silverfish, probably for mice too. That smell…she remembered that sickeningly-sweet smell of decaying bindings and newsprint from Floyd fucking Fisk’s downtown store, Second Chance Books. It had been there since before she was born; he’d bought it from the retiring owner who’d had it like since Abraham Lincoln stopped shaving.

This shit was so fucked-up. She looked high and low, at all the murder of trees. An open box to her left invited a glance. It was full of moldering magazines in plastic bags. The covers of the ones she could see were adorned with spaceships and weird alien-looking faces and had the titles
Galaxy, Worlds Of If, Analog
and
Astounding Science Fiction
. That figured, she thought. Floyd fucking Fisk probably didn’t even know what really good sci-fi was, like Star Trek and Star Wars. In other boxes and on other shelves she saw titles like
Argosy
,
Esquire
,
Ellery Queen
and
Alfred Hitchcock
. And who the
fuck
ever needed so many sets of encyclopedias? They were bound up with cords and looked like weapons of mass destruction. And then there was the
ancient
stuff in here, the books that appeared to be bound from slabs of wood or crinkly cowhide. There had to be a book of dirty jokes written by Nero around somewhere:
The One-Handed
Fiddler and 101 More
,
Or: Pluck It Baby
!

But this was no fucking joke in here, this was a serious place. It was where the family car had alternated with Berke’s early—”junior”, the ad had called it—drumkit. It was where she busted some sticks and hammered some heads. It was where she’d been, many times, when the police car pulled up and the cop who got to know the Fisk family said if the girl just didn’t play so late at
night
, they could work this out with the neighbors. It was the bass beat that was coming through the closed garage door, so maybe they could muffle it with a few pillows?

Sweet sound of rolling thunder, crashing above the mediocre sea of the whitebread world. Dad would have understood. Dad would have said,
Pump up the volume, kid, and don’t ever let it
get so quiet that you have to hear yourself think
.

“There they are.” Chappie motioned toward three large cardboard boxes lying side-by-side-by-side on the floor toward the back of the garage. Berke saw that the one on the left bore the black marker numeral 1, the middle 2 and the one on the right 3. They were sealed with regular white masking tape, but it wouldn’t be any kind of job ripping them open.

“Man, this is a lot of books,” Terry said, as he turned in a circle between Ariel and Nomad. “Wonder if there are any old keyboard manuals in here. Would you know?” he asked Chappie.

“I wouldn’t. This is special stuff that Floyd wanted to keep. You should see the backroom at the bookstore.”

“Did he make a good living?” Nomad asked. “Just selling old books?”

“He got orders from everywhere once he started selling on eBay. We weren’t getting rich, but he was able to pay off the house.”

There was an abrupt tearing noise as Berke stripped the tape off the top seam of Box Number 1.

“You got it?” Nomad asked.

She didn’t answer. She stripped the tape off the edges and pulled the box open.

Chappie stepped forward to see, because she had no idea what Floyd had left their girl.

Berke didn’t know what she was looking at. That pungence of old newsprint drifted up into her face, and she thought if she blew her nose the snot would be yellow. Whatever they were—papers of some kind—they were protected in the plastic bags and backed with cardboard. She brought the first of them out into the light.

It had a strange fold. She removed it from its plastic, and a few tiny pieces of paper spun out around her. Almost dust, but not quite.

There was a gray field of newsprint and a headline
The High Cost Of Music and Love:
Where’s The Money From Monterey?

There was a black-and-white photograph of John Lennon, unmistakably John Lennon in specs just like Terry’s, dressed as a British soldier with a webbing on his helmet, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun, his lips pursed in either surprise or the beginning of a whistle.

Above the photograph there was a logo that read
Rolling Stone
. And beside it was the date: November 9, 1967.

She handed it to Terry, who had also come forward to see. She took the next paper from its plastic. This
Rolling Stone
bore a cover photograph of Tina Turner—it said this young woman was Tina Turner, right there in the caption—caught in a blurred moment of dramatic intensity on stage, and there was a story with the headline
Bob Dylan Alive In Nashville: Work Starts On
New LP
. The date was November 23, 1967.

“My God,” said Terry in a stunned voice, as he peered into the box of treasures. “It’s a mint set. The golden age of
Rolling Stone
.”

The third issue that Berke brought up had a photograph of a group of about thirty or so people in all manner of clothes sitting on a series of steps in front of a building. She spotted the Fab Four—Paul McCartney was so
young
—among them. The headline was
New Thing For Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour
. The date was December 14, 1967.

“Mint,” Terry said again. He shook his head in awe. But for the aging of the paper itself, each
Rolling Stone
looked to be right off the press.

Berke continued to bring them up from the darkness of the box, into the light. She looked at the papers, at the covers and at some of the pages within, and then she passed them back for her friends to see. A lost age revealed itself to her. It was captured in gritty and startling black-and-white pictures with colored borders. It was held in headlines like
The Los Angeles Scene
and
American Revolution
1969 and
Forty Pages Full Of Dope, Sex and Cheap Thrills
. It was offered up from the past by the announcements that Cream had broken up, that the Rolling Stones were on the verge of the great comeback of their career, that Johnny Cash was playing a concert at San Quentin, that Janis Joplin might be the Judy Garland of Rock, that Fillmore West was closing, that Paul Is Not Dead, that the Underground Press of America was alive and well, that Chicago’s Conspiracy Eight was the Trial Of The New Culture, that contained in these pages was All The News That Fits, and that this publication would steadfastly present its Continuing Coverage Of The Apocalypse in this turbulent summer of 1970.

The second box held more, all pristine, all protected in plastic. In the third box, the front covers became full color and the paper quality slicker. As Chappie returned to the house to get some more coffee, Terry encouraged Berke to keep going to the bottom. It took Berke a while to get to the last paper, which was dated April 29, 1982, and had on its cover the black-and-white photo of a very sad-looking dark-eyed, dark-haired man whom the caption identified as John Belushi.

“An interview with Sun Ra,” Terry said, carefully holding one of the early papers open. The images and typeface bloomed large in his specs. He sounded like he might be about to faint from ecstacy. “Oh my
God
.”

Nomad was regarding a cover picture of Elvis Presley decked out in black leather. Ariel had just turned a few pages in the
Stone
she was holding and abruptly stopped. On the page before her was the wild, ink-spattered drawing of a distorted, one-eyed, American-flag-draped figure whose mouth was stretched impossibly wide, and from that cavernous drooling hole spurted forth a vomit of spiky missiles and speeding jet airplanes. The artist had signed a name in crazed and crooked letters at the bottom of the art, and that name was
Steadman
.

She closed the paper. It was a little too disturbing.

“Three hundred and forty five issues, give or take,” Terry said when he’d recovered himself. Most of them had been replaced in their plastic and returned to the boxes, though not in order this time. A few of the older papers were still lying about. “You’re gonna need another U-Haul.”

“Yeah.” Berke nodded. “I guess I am.” Her mind was reeling from the faces and names these boxes had yielded up to her: Van Morrison, Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa, Marvin Gaye, the Jefferson Airplane, Joe Cocker, The Grateful Dead, David Bowie, Cat Stevens, Joan Baez, MC5, the Doors, Steely Dan, Brian Wilson, James Taylor, Steve Winwood, Elton John, Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry and Keith Moon and John Paul Jones and…it just went on and on.

Ariel picked up another issue, because on the cover she recognized the face of a very young Joni Mitchell, whom she’d liked to listen to as a teenager in the solace of her room and who actually had influenced her own playing and writing. The date was May 17, 1969. Joni Mitchell looked out at the viewer with a hint of anger in her eyes, as if adamant that her private space not be invaded. In purple hippie-type letters was the headline
The Swan Song of Folk
Music
.