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.