The Big Rewind (5 page)

B
aldrick was asleep on my bed when I got home just after three
A.M.
For the first time since I'd gone off to college, I felt guilty coming in late. I flicked on the light, and he ran to his bowl and sat there waiting even though he had plenty of food. I poured in a little more just to appease him and went into my room. I'd do Philip's laundry tomorrow.

Back in college, I made friends with Reese, a genuine Jersey boy with black hair and thick lips and bottomless eyes who now lived in Portland and reviewed video games for a living. But back then, he lived in the corner suite on my dorm floor, and it was in that room, watching
Sealab 2021,
that I started to get over my freshman-year breakup with William, who had dumped me by getting engaged to someone else when he transferred to Dartmouth. Reese was many things—brutally funny, an early adopter of low-fi indie music, and always in the mood to order a pizza—but he wasn't good at dealing with a crying girl he'd met just over a month ago. In an effort to cheer me up, he put the Mr. T Experience's “The Boyfriend Box” on a mix he made me, titled
Hardcore Pining,
possibly in hopes that it would help me get over William. Instead, it had prompted me to compile every token of lost love—all the letters, stuffed animals, bad poetry, and mix CDs—in one place. They weren't organized with any nostalgia,
as KitKat's mix tapes and track lists were; everything was shoved in there like cursed pirate treasure. The box had traveled, unopened, with me every time I moved. As long as it was there, I didn't have to think about it—like it was the Dorian Gray picture of my heart.

I put on the Blondie T-shirt and checkered flannel lounge pants that served as my pajamas and wrestled the box out of the closet. Seeing all of KitKat's old tapes had awoken my own anxieties about my romantic past, the boys I'd left behind, the ones who'd broken my heart.

Taking a deep breath, I pulled off the lid.
Just one item,
I told myself.
Just one thing to satisfy your curiosity.

I pulled out a CD from Jeremy, titled
Bright Lights, Little City,
the track-list collage like a soccer mom's scrapbook page—red sequins along the outer edge of the paper, torn-up scraps of sheet music, all surrounding a backstage picture of us in too much makeup with overexuberant grins and demon-red eyes reflecting the shoddy flash of a disposable camera. The curtain must have just come down. There is no moment so happy as the end of the opening-night show, the relief that, despite hell week and sore throats, tongue-twister lines and terrifying solos, it had all come together in two glorious hours of song and dance.

Jeremy and I had dated very briefly in our freshman year of high school, during that strange vortex of stage time when you're spending every minute together and it develops somehow into love. The show was
Annie;
he was Rooster and I was Lily St. Regis. I should have been Miss Hannigan and he should have been Daddy Warbucks, but those roles—surprise, surprise—both went to upperclassmen. On opening night, during “Easy Street,” he'd slapped me on the ass just after my solo and kissed me for the first time during intermission.

He made me this CD just after the show ended and three weeks before our monthlong love affair ended. He didn't date anyone else for a while, so we'd stayed friendly until the divergences of class schedules and new social groups drifted us apart.
He went on to play Billy Crocker in our sophomore production of
Anything Goes
while I was stuck as one of the Angels; then he was Curly in
Oklahoma!
while I was Ado Annie Carnes. Senior year, he played Danny Zuko in
Grease
. I skipped out because I'd always thought the eponymous line in “You're the One That I Want,” which the director added in over the curtain call, was the musical equivalent of cockroaches skittering up your arm. After graduation, Jeremy was accepted into the musical-theater program at Carnegie Mellon and, as far as I knew, had never returned to Loring.

It was the first mix CD anyone had ever made me. His dad was a lawyer and made good enough money that he had a stereo system with tape-to-tape transfer and a CD burner built in that, more often than not, would tack on the last song three or four times before the CD ran out of space. Jeremy started a CD-burning business for our classmates, which, at ten dollars a pop, paid for more than one date at the one-screen movie theater two blocks from his house.

I opened the case and took out the track list. It was almost all show tunes: “If Ever I Would Leave You” from
Camelot;
“I've Never Been in Love Before” from
Guys and Dolls;
Jeremy singing “All Through the Night” from
Anything Goes,
his soulful, beautiful tenor distant and obscured by poor recording equipment. But he'd thrown a handful of pop songs on there, too, because it was the late nineties: the gag-worthy “Truly Madly Deeply,” by Savage Garden; Faith Hill's dippy “This Kiss”; the 10,000 Maniacs version of “Because the Night”; and “2 Become 1” because he'd had an irrational love for all things Spice Girls. Once, I spent all night by the phone, trying to be caller ninety-seven at Sweet 97.7 to win us tickets to see the
Spiceworld
tour at Madison Square Garden. I never got the tickets, and anyway, we'd broken up by their July tour date.

Of all the musical-theater nerds in the J. C. Kevlin High School drama club, Jeremy was the most likely to have really
made it onstage. I hoped he had. I slid the CD into my laptop and hummed along as I searched for him online. And sure enough, there he was, starring as Amos Hart in
Chicago
. He was there, in my city, doing what he loved. He'd made it. And maybe, I thought as I yawned and closed my laptop, he might even want to see an old friend.

I
was still drying my hair with a Batman beach towel when I answered the door to a starry-eyed Sid, one earbud dangling loose.

“Listen,” he said, pressing it to my ear. “Doesn't that just sound like love? Right there, that jangly guitar right before the first verse,
that's
what it sounds like when you're walking back from a party and you've just met the love of your life; you've got a few drinks on your brain and her number on your phone and it's just the happiest goddamn feeling in the whole world. Bernard Sumner captured that feeling and distilled it down to six minutes and fifty-nine seconds of pure magic.”

I loved the narratives Sid created for his music. It was never just, “I like this song”; he always had an elaborate scene to describe how it made him feel.

“What is it?” I asked. I wasn't as up on my eighties music as I probably should have been, especially for being friends with Sid.

“New Order, ‘Temptation,'” he said, putting one arm around my waist and waltzing me in a circle. “Just hearing it makes my heart swell—I've listened to it twice since I got off the subway.”

I wished I shared his early-morning musical enthusiasm. I hadn't gotten much sleep after Facebook-stalking Jeremy; Baldrick had woken me up by ramming his hard fluffy head into
mine around nine, and it hadn't seemed worth it to go back to sleep if we were going to Egg School at eleven. I had barely put together a decent brunch outfit—a black pleated cheerleader skirt, vintage plaid double-breasted jacket, fourteen-eyelet Doc Martens with rose-print knee socks poking out like I was an extra from
Clueless
—while Sid had on an effortless ensemble of dark blue jeans with the cuffs turned up and a tucked-in flannel shirt in purple and gray check. Anyone else trying to pull it off would have looked like a hipster lumberjack, but Sid carried it off with a cool, straight-backed elegance. He only wore his black-rimmed glasses on Sunday. Natalie had once remarked to me that he looked like a cowboy Morrissey. If she had been thinking of making him the next entry on her blog, she'd never actually made the move.

“You look cute,” he said, wrapping his headphones around his phone. “Like Winona Ryder in
Heathers
.”

“Thanks,” I said. “So what's this story you've got to tell me?”

He flopped down on the couch. “Jett, you're not even going to believe me if I tell you,” he said, grinning.

“Try me,” I said. “It'll keep me entertained while I do my hair.”

“All right, so Terry takes me to this strip club, called Fairy Tales,” he began. Already I wasn't interested, but I still had most of my head to braid. “It's insanely tacky, all these women dressed in these skimpy princess costumes, like the damn village on Halloween, only you have to slip them a twenty instead of an eight-dollar shot. Terry's got the hots for this one girl, Tinker Bell, but they got in some kind of row and he ended up getting kicked out of the club while I was in the Rose Room getting a lap dance from Cinderella.”

“You went into the Rose Room?”

“Terry made me,” he said, getting a little red in the cheeks. “But that's not even the best part—so here I am, all alone at this club I've never been to, in a part of town I didn't even know existed, with this girl, Cinderella, and we get talking. Turns out she's a misplaced southerner too, a Georgia girl, goes to church
with her grandmother on Sundays. And before I know it, it's two
A.M.
When I leave, she follows me out to the parking lot and gives me this little kiss on the cheek.” He gestured to the spot on his face like it was sacred.

“Sid,” I said, trying to twist my frown into some semblance of an ironic smile. “She probably does that to all the guys—it's her job.”

“I know that, but this was different,” he said insistently. “I saw how she acted with all the other guys, and I know this was something else. Think I might go back to see her later tonight.”

Out of nowhere, I pictured Amanda, the girl Catch left me for, in that little Cinderella costume. Jealousy bubbled up inside me like a poisoned well, and I tried to fight it back.
This isn't Amanda, this is just some stranger,
I told myself.
She's not trying to steal your man because Sid isn't yours to steal.
That made me feel worse, and before I could stop myself, I spit out, “You think she's going to remember your lap over the hundred other guys she's serviced this week?”

All the blush drained from his face. “Forget it,” he said, standing up.

“Sid . . .” There was an apology tacked in there somewhere, but I couldn't wrangle it out of my throat.

“No, you're probably right.” He wouldn't look at me, just fiddled with his phone. “Come on—we've got to motor if we don't want them to give our table away.”

B
RONCO WASN'T AT
Egg School, but his name was. The cops had picked him up the night before for KitKat's murder and every tabloid had the headline. They'd gotten a partial fingerprint from the rolling pin, and another neighbor had seen him entering the apartment just hours before she was killed. As everyone waded through the story, I tried not to think about the tape on my table, the motive in my head. I wanted to believe he was innocent, I wanted to believe that someone I knew wasn't capable of this kind
of brutality. But I knew Bronco even less than I knew KitKat, and these days, you just don't know. After brunch, I told myself. After brunch I would call the cops and turn over the tape.

Today Egg School wasn't turning anyone away. Those who didn't have tables by lottery or connections hunched over friends, reading the spread over their shoulders. The room was thick with the smell of coffee and cigarettes and last night's perfume. Mac and Natalie waved us over to their table, and we squeezed into the last free corner of the bench next to three people we didn't know. I subtly leaned into Sid, hoping I wouldn't faint or throw up from my own overwhelming anxiety.

“He didn't do this,” Mac said. “R-rated movies make him squeamish. He couldn't have.”

Natalie adjusted her cat-eye glasses and picked up one of the papers that everyone had already read. “‘A jealous, reefer-fueled rage'?” She read the headline in a voice dripping with disgust like grease off diner bacon. “What is this, 1936?”

A skinny kid in a Dr. Who shirt started to say something, but the burly guy he was with shushed him. I didn't recognize either of them from previous brunches, but they seemed ready enough to defend Bronco that they couldn't have just been walk-by traffic. GPL, perhaps?

“Who's that?” I asked Natalie.

“That's Bronco's friend Bryce,” she said. “He's a bartender at the Inconvenience Lounge. The guy with him is the owner, Wally. They do drag nights. We should go.”

“Yeah,” I said, even though the last thing I was interested in right now was making plans to go barhopping. I went back to reading the paper over Mac's shoulder, hoping it might give me some clues as to what the hell was going on in my world.

“This is just the pigs picking on another black man,” Mac chimed in. “I guess we should be grateful they didn't shoot him on sight.”

“He was a vegan, for fuck's sake,” Natalie added. “He couldn't eat cheese, but he could bash his girlfriend's head in with a marble rolling pin? No fucking way.”

Sid piped up. “You never know. Back in Oklahoma City, the scout leader of my cousin Sally's troop just up and one day shot her husband. People snap.”

I elbowed him in the ribs.

“Fuck you, you fucking redneck faggot!” a porkpie-sporting neckbeard shouted from the back of the room.

“Guys, chill!” Lovelle, the barista, hollered. She unwound the scrunchie from her dirty-blond dreadlocks before pulling them back again nervously. “Randy and I have already started up his defense fund and bail. We've got a jar on the counter, and if you're on our Facebook or Twitter, we'll let you know about upcoming events.”

“We've got a jar at the record store!” Mac added.

The guy next to Mac, in a Beastie Boys T-shirt, piped up. “And our band Chicken Puppet's doing a benefit show—”

“—at my gallery!” Natalie finished.

“What's important right now is letting him know we support him,” said Randy. “Lovelle's got some sign-up sheets to visit him in jail; if you can, either sign up for a visit, send a letter, or donate to a care package.”

I signed my name when the clipboard came to me and passed it on before picking up my menu. “Does anybody know anyone with the initials GPL?” I asked, trying to act casual.

Natalie barely looked up from her menu. “No,” she said. “Why?”

Well, that did me a whole lot of no good. “I got a package for her from someone with the initials GPL. A mix tape. There were a couple more tapes from the same person in a box her sister gave me. Does that sound like anything?”

Natalie laughed and rolled her eyes. “God, KitKat and her mix tapes. She probably ordered it off Etsy. If KitKat had the space in her apartment, she would have kept all her VHS tapes too.” To the lumbersexual to her left, she said, “Order me the eggs Benedict with turkey bacon. Wheat toast. I need a smoke.”

It wasn't an Etsy find. No one wrote
I listen to this song when I ache for you
next to the Lightning Seeds' “Pure” for a customer, even a repeat one. But no one else at the table offered up any other suggestion as to who GPL might be, leaving me right back where I started—nowhere.

“I didn't mean to offend anyone,” Sid murmured from behind his menu.

“No worries,” I said. “You didn't know.” If that's the reaction Sid got with a theory, I sure as hell wasn't going to offer up the evidence I had without vetting who I asked and in what order. If word of that tape got out and it fell into police hands, it might convict Bronco merely by what it implied, making me a pariah in the process. There had to be more to this story than a jealous boyfriend. That much, I had to believe, if for no other reason than to preserve my own illusion of security.

GPL
'S MYSTERY TAPE
was still waiting for me when I got back around one. I checked Natalie's Etsy theory just to be sure. There were a handful of mix tapes for sale, all customizable, none shipping from anywhere remotely close to Binghamton. So much for that.

The detective's card was still on my fridge. I looked at the tape on my table. I thought about Bronco and the headlines, the few things I knew and all that I didn't. I wanted to believe in law and order, that good cops always caught the bad guys, but this was ugly math, wrongs making more wrongs. Sure he was there the day of the crime. Sure they had a fingerprint on what they declared to be the murder weapon. But my gut was telling me the cops had the wrong guy. If they were going to find him guilty, they didn't need my help.

I tore up the detective's card and scattered the fragments across the junk mail and cereal boxes in my recycling. Bronco was a friend, and he needed me to prove his innocence. If he was guilty, I could face that later, but right now, I had to test out my intuition
that GPL and his tapes were somehow linked into this—for good or for ill.

But with no tape deck, I wasn't going to find out what he was trying to say and whether or not that held any clues about KitKat's death. Maybe he'd been stalking her and the tape would be nothing but his breathing hard and jerking off. Maybe he was in a terrible garage band and he was sending her a demo in hopes she'd pass it along to some cool indie producer.

I wouldn't know—and Bronco might stay in jail—unless I found that answer. And unless I had a time machine to take me back to a RadioShack in the nineties to purchase a boombox, I was going to have to make some Luddite friends.

A few weeks ago while we were both on the second shift at Hartford, my friend Marty gave me a flyer for his Sunday afternoon Tom Waits show at Bosco's Lounge on Purcell Street. I liked Marty; whenever we were on the same shift, we would talk about music in the spare moments between documents. We swapped playlists I wasn't sure either of us ever really listened to—I know I didn't—boasted of our vinyl finds, and played for each other whatever song we were obsessed with at the moment. The last time I saw him, he'd just finished restoring a reel-to-reel player he'd found in a pile of curbside junk on the Upper West Side.

If anyone would have a tape player, it would be Marty.