Chapter 1

It was Paula who called and faxed me these clippings from the Eugene newspapers, a surprising event. Paula and I mutually disliked each other. Though the same age as Vy, best friends since middle school, her character had developed opposite to Vy's, causing their relationship to be almost a mother/daughter sort of thing, with Paula overly protective of her sensitive and free-spirited friend. An intelligent, ambitious and cold eyed soul made Paula becoming Vy's manager inevitable, and she succeeded brilliantly. The one issue which tore at their friendship was Vy's choice of men, a surprisingly rare disruption because despite Vy's beauty and the notorious loose morals found in the rock 'n roll culture Vy ended up far more often than not alone in her bed.

Not obviously or classically beautiful combined with her reclusive nature kept Vy a virgin until high school ended. In fact the night of celebrating the achievement of her high school diploma marked the end of her virginity. She made sure of that, attaching herself to the older brother of a fellow graduate whose house hosted the after graduation party, that is when she wasn't setting up or performing with an early incarnation of her band "to molt." With a single minded relentlessness which she demonstrated throughout her too short life, a microscopic vision in contrast to the macroscopic, big picture vision of her best friend Paula, she essentially cornered the young man until she got what she wanted, leaving him with a bloodied condom still hanging from his limp dick.

One might consider it luck that the man she chose to deflower her proved a capable lover who made sure of her readiness for his cock to pierce her hymen, spending nearly an hour pleasuring her with hands and tongue, waiting to give her her first penetration once she climaxed. But Vy somehow knew who to choose for this significant moment. Her reclusiveness was not narcissistic; it stemmed from an intense sensitivity towards others. Surrounded tightly by people, even fans, horrified her. Especially fans because they tended to push in towards her. I witnessed Paula pulling her out of such a group once, and Vy told me afterward Paula had rescued her several times from such occurrences. Vy looked shaken and even paler than normal.

Wanting nothing more from Zach, her first lover, than for her to experience sex, she had no interest in contacting him, but the feeling wasn't mutual.

As the band evolved, Vy unsentimentally booting out and replacing every member one by one except the spectacular and spectacular looking drummer, a hard bodied blonde with the grungiest outfits and no make-up who seemed more attractive because of her unkempt look (though her hair was always well coifed, or at least before and after her performances), they achieved more and more success and gained more and more gigs. Zach came to nearly every gig. And at nearly every gig he attended, he was told to fuck off, usually by Paula. He might have gotten the hint eventually except Vy would succumb to his needs when her needs matched at least sexually.

Though she had no one to compare him to, Dotty, the drummer had made it clear to her Zach was a good lover, telling her most of Dotty's frequent one night stands had been disappointments. Except for when he deflowered her, he would make her cum while they fucked every time. This impressed Dotty if not Vy. So the last time Vy succumbed to her libido with Zach and tried to make her usual quick escape and he held her back and desperately proclaimed his love for her more than usual, banishing all the calming of a particularly vigorous orgasm, she decided to give him Dotty.

At the next gig, though Zach tried bypassing her to get to his true love, Dotty clung to him like a vine and kissed him into submission. His lovemaking proved to be all Vy had said it was, and the two became a couple, eventually moving past lust into heartfelt love.

Though never completely losing his obsession for Vy, he came to realize how much he enjoyed Dotty and her body never failing to turn him on didn't hurt. And Dotty felt the same towards him. She hadn't abandoned her addiction to the occasional one night stand, though fewer occurred. Instead of hiding these away and creating a guilty conscience, she used them to spice up their sex play and even encouraged Zach to have some fun when she toured, which eventually he did, but never with Vy. Though tempted, he wasn't stupid enough to succumb to it. Dotty wouldn't have made an issue of it he knew, but he'd lose her because all the time love developed between them would be gone in a meaningless, for Vy at least, one last fling.

The preamble is my attempt to make clear why, despite Paula's view to the contrary, I was meant to be in Vy's life. When we first met I could swear I made all the moves, but once I got to know her I realized she made the moves on me, which of course is par for the course for women, at least those who know what they want and get it.

Appropriately enough, we met at a record store. I was making my usual rounds of the remarkable record stores and bookstores on Telegraph Hill in Berkeley, something I do, along with visiting City Lights Bookshop and eating at Fisherman's Wharf with my mom every time I visit. When our eyes met we shopped at Amoeba. She perused her competition in the Punk Rock section and I searched through the Jazz section looking for gems. As the glances became more frequent and longer, we closed the gap between us until we hovered near the middle aisle and a couple rows away.

As I said before, Vy was beautiful, but not typically. I couldn't see much of her body from below the breasts, but the breasts were large, not huge, but substantial, visible within her black hoody and over large black t-shirt. Her shoulders seemed to fill out the hoody, so she probably had some meat on her bones. Pale skin contrasted with the black outfit and black hair. Cute and punky and shoulder length, most of it banded into chaotic tassels, her hair had been tied into five protuberances giving the appearance of black geysers frozen in place. Her soft and rounded and seemingly plain face had an inner glow charisma gives to very few people. Remarkably open and large and expressive eyes, their deep brown coronas lured me into the tiny black holes sucking emotion and interest instead of gravity. She smiled gently at me, lifting her cheeks, making her unabashedly pretty. I was about to approach and say something clever and off the cuff to her, I had no idea what, when her remarkable smile froze me in place.

I felt less lucky when a slender young man wrapped in black leather and silver spikes approached her out of nowhere. "Can you autograph your album for me?" he asked.

They each patted their bodies and Vy searched through her odd purse, looking like a burnt orange shag carpet sewn into a shoulder bag, but found no felt tip pens. Unprepared to autograph anything when not at a club would change with greater popularity when such encounters happened with far more frequency. Unfortunately I had no felt tip either, but approached the two with a suggestion.

"Why don't you grab all her albums, bring them up to the register, buy them, ask the clerk for a felt tip pen and then you can give or sell them to your friends with her signature?"

"You don't have to..." said the woman I would quickly learn to call Vy.

"Great idea!" shouted the punk who proceeded to gather the three other "to molt" records in the bin and rush them to the register.

"I hope he's not spending his last dime on all those," said Vy.

"The kid's got more money than he knows what to do with. Though his parents aren't sure about his choice of clothing, they figure he'll grow out of it and make them proud some day and are willing to support his whims for the time being."

"How could you..."

"He hasn't even broken in his five hundred dollar leather jacket, and the spikes are too shiny to have weathered any abuse."

"But the jacket is..."

"Pre-worn. Some machine or some poor peasant wore it out for him. The wear is too even and the leather has not yet met a wrinkle."

"Too bad they've only got four of my albums," she said with a laugh, raspy and deep like her voice. It and her voice affected me. Their quiet warmth felt like gentle sandpaper on my dick. "I should warn you. I have a manager already, and she has no plans to be usurped, even by a clever and handsome man."

"Usurped?" I thought to myself. "She's cute AND smart."

My plans or hopes of seducing this woman amped up. Her ego boosting comment barely registered as a beginning of her seduction. My brief inventory of her body, which while full, seemed firm and shapely and meaty encouraged my desire. Though I enjoyed the lithe slimness of my partner Sandy and the perfect model body of Deidre, who at this time though for not much longer continued as my lover in Waikiki, I had loved my former girlfriend Kitty's ample posterior, and with Vy's large firm breasts echoing her large hips and thighs, I could barely contain my saliva. If I was a cartoon wolf, I'd be howling.

After autographing the LPs with personal messages for the young man and three of his friends, we continued shopping, which meant her wandering over to the Jazz area. Admitting my lack of knowledge of punk rock and hers of jazz, we decided to have her learn something new. Giving her a brief history of jazz by moving from bin to bin, starting from Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five and moving through Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman and the Big Band era and then Charlie Parker and Be-Bop into the Cool of Miles Davis and the freer sounds of Coltrane and Mingus to the Ecstatic sound of Albert Ayler into the Avant Garde weirdness of Sun Ra enabled me to create a stack of records filling gaps in my collection with peak historical moments.

"But what about lyrics?" asked my gracious and patient student towards the end of the survey.

"Yeah," I admitted, "even the greatest of jazz artists often pen weak lyrics. Although..." I headed to the "H" section and scanned through Billie Holiday.

"I've heard a couple of her songs. I like her."

"Have you heard 'Strange Fruit'?" I asked, and when she shook her head, I grabbed an album with that amazing song on it along with songs with some of her great lyrics. I already had a very nice collection of Lady Day's music, but this was a present.

"What I like about her is not only her soulful voice, but you can hear the lyrics," said Vy.

"There was a time when that was most important," I said nostalgically.

"Yeah. Sometimes I wonder why I write lyrics at all. There's anger in the music, but it would be nice to let the audience know exactly what I'm angry about. I'm going to work on that," she said, smiling up at me. "Thanks."

We brought my pile of albums and her tiny stack of one album and a couple of 45s to the counter. I offered to buy them for her, which she allowed except for the album. "If I'm getting you a present at least I should pay for it," she explained.

It was a Dead Kennedys LP, my first punk album and still one of my favorite records, although I rarely play it now because it reminds me too much of Vy when we first met that lovely day that turned into a lovely week, reminding me of her somehow even more than her own records. And along with her own records, I spent the night following the news of her death by playing it over and over again and grieving the loss of one of the great souls to ever walk the earth.

Once outside the safety of the record store where nearly every word we spoke referred to music, a decision needed to determine our fate. After a pause a few steps outside of the entrance to Amoeba, I asked her, "Are you hungry?"

"Starving," she said. "But I'm strictly vegetarian."

"Me too," I said, which she received with an obvious look of doubt. I had the healthy face or smell or stride of a meat eater. Whatever it was, Vy knew I lied.

If I could tell a boy's wealth by his clothes, Vy could sense the true nature of a person by something much deeper, whether their eyes or their gestures or their voice clued her in I don't know, perhaps their vibe, whatever that is, but if it exists, Vy proved it.

"When I'm in San Francisco, I'm a vegetarian," I clarified, "because my mom is, except when we indulge in butter slathered shell fish at Fisherman's Wharf."

"Okay," she said, a little concerned. "Just don't lie. I can almost always tell."

"About being a vegetarian?" I asked.

"About anything," she said.

I'm not much for lying unless I'm on a case, and then I'm very good at it, but since I wasn't on a case, I saw no reason to test her remarkable statement. But even more than the odd and confident concept of her being a human lie detector (of course detecting a human lying would be a detector's only use, because as far as anyone knows no other animal lies at least with words, but I mean a human as opposed to a machine) her statement had a lovely suggestion in it. She wanted to continue our friendship in order for me to continue not telling her lies.

"I have a suggestion," I said bravely, "and you can of course do whatever you want with it, agree to it or tell me to fuck off or suggest something more pleasant."

"I'm listening," she said, her smile reassuring if a little tense.

"My mom is a pretty good cook and she has a well stocked kitchen, especially since I'm visiting, and she also has one of the best stereos I've ever heard, which isn't saying much, but..."

"So you don't actually live with her," said Vy, her smile increasing.

"No. I live in Waikiki."

"No shit?"

"I wouldn't dare lie to you," I said, causing her unfortunately to slug me hard on my right shoulder. "Ow!" I said from the pain and the surprise.

"Don't fuck with me, Joe. Don't condescend. I know what I said seems strange, but just like I expect you to be truthful, I expect the same from myself. I will never lie to you, and I will never pretend to be better than you because I'm not, nor are you any better than me. Sorry. I bet that hurt."

"It did, but I'll live."

"You'd better, because you have to continue your invitation to go to your mother's house and eat her delicious vegetarian food and listen to your cool records."

"And yours," I said with a smile.

"Then we'd better stop at my house to pick up more music, since you know as little about my music as I do about yours. I'll introduce you to my best friend and manager. I'm sure she'll hate you."

"Why would she hate me?"

"She hates all the men I like, not that there's been all that many. Maybe you'll be the first she'll like, but I doubt it. Where's your car?"

"I'm a mass transit sort of guy here."

"That's cool. It's only a few blocks."

We walked a little over a mile to the house Vy and the band used while in the Bay area, a summer rental they rented while working on their third album at a studio run by Jello Biafra, the lead singer of the Dead Kennedys and his label, Alternative Tentacles. Toting a full load of records, it felt like a long walk but both me and Vy kept in shape, and I enjoyed the company. She was excited about working with Jello, though she suspected the reason for him signing them onto his label came from having the hots for their drummer, which when I met Dotty I understood, though her attractiveness was more understood than felt because when I met her I had the hots for the lead singer.

By the time we reached the house, a large Victorian structure straining from the abuse of the continuous stream of impetuous students that passed through it year after year, I had informed her of my work in Hawaii.

"So you do undercover work?" she asked.

"Yes. It's the second favorite part of my job."

"Before telling me the first, let me make this clear. You lie for a living and you enjoy it."

"Guilty as charged," I said.

She stopped abruptly, and since we walked side by side, I stopped nearly as abruptly. She looked thoughtful, and cute I might add, studying my face thoroughly before she made her decision. For some reason, whether it was because we had just met and no real attachments had been made or she needed to see me in the full light of truth if attached so to speak, I felt comfortable and confident while she stared.

"You leave your lies at work. I'm glad you're not working now," she said.

"Me too," I said.

She laughed and asked about my favorite part of my job.

"Solving the case. I'm very good at it."

"And at lying?" she asked. Our walk had curved toward the house, so I knew we had arrived, but she stopped before we entered. "And at lying?" she repeated.

"Yes," I said.

"Cool," she said and rose up on her toes to kiss my cheek before taking my hand for the first time and leading me into the house.

The interior looked even more worn than the exterior. The furniture and carpeting appeared haphazardly placed, walls were dingy and bare and the house smelled musty with layers of beer, marijuana and tobacco. A dirty blonde with a thin but pretty face looking clean and well pressed in her white blouse and designer jeans, a complete anachronism to her surroundings, talked on the phone, a mug of coffee near her hand resting on a well stained wooden side table. Being the same age as Vy, she was in her early twenties but looked older. Her tight jeans revealed a thickness to her abdomen and her narrow hips and slight bust made her anything but voluptuous, so sexually she wasn't my type. Lucky for me, because I appeared not to be her type either.

She looked at me with Vy, our hands still together and her pretty face became not as pretty as I first thought. Vy smiled at her and waved and pointed towards the kitchen. Paula waved back, the expression on her face telling me everything I needed to know.

As sensitive as Vy was to the essence of others, I always wondered why she didn't see the intense love and frustrating jealousy Paula felt for her. Vy never told me if they had been lovers. I never asked. Perhaps they had been or continued to be and had fought about being exclusive and Paula had lost these arguments. Despite the pounding my shoulder took and would take a couple more times in our relationship, Vy was anything but mean, so her arriving with a beau in hand could never be seen as flaunting her sexual conquests in front of Paula, but simply expressing her freedom to love and be loved if only occasionally. In other words, Vy was being Vy and nothing Paula could do could change it except to hate her boyfriends.

Leading me into the kitchen led me to meet Dotty busy rolling joints. "Great. Company," said Dotty after being introduced.

While Vy climbed the stairs to her room to choose her records for our listening session, Dotty lit a plump joint and passed it to me.

"Isn't she beautiful?" she asked. When I nodded she winked and said, "Good boy." And before taking a hit from the joint I returned to her, she added, "Lucky boy."

I coughed. "Good shit," said the blonde beauty roughly, holding the smoke in her lungs.

While I inhaled a second hit, Vy returned. She hadn't changed her clothes, but the fabric sticking out of her small army green backpack looked very much like she didn't plan on returning home until at least sometime tomorrow morning. Obviously she was a girl after my own heart and other parts of my anatomy.

When she offered the joint to Dotty, the blonde waved it away. "We're two up on you," she explained. "Do you have anything to put these in?" she asked, holding up a couple of equally plump and well rolled joints. I told her I didn't. Entering her purse, which looked like she purchased it from an Army Navy store, an army green shoulder bag, she pulled out an Altoid case. When she opened it she laughed. "I gotta stop smoking this shit. I completely forgot I had these," showing me four plump joints resting inside. "Take these, Joe. It's even better."

I thanked her. Vy grabbed a couple dry oat cakes and a bottle of orange juice, shoved them into her shaggy bag and led me back into the living room, catching Paula between calls, so Vy introduced me. I shook her reluctant hand. "Phone number," said Paula, shoving a small spiral notebook and a pen at me. I wrote my mother's number. "If you're late, you better call ahead," said Paula to Vy.

"Am I ever late?" asked Vy, quietly angry. "Just be thankful I'm not some junkie dickhead you're managing. But then why bother talking about being late because he wouldn't listen, would he? I listen. I respect you. You're the best friend I have and will ever have. So why can't you be nice to Joe and happy I met such a nice man. You know and I know it doesn't happen every day. Hardly ever. Nice. I'm nice, you're nice, he's nice, so be nice. Okay?"

Paula's eyes looked sad and her face twisted, not knowing what to express. She shrugged. "Whatever," said Vy. "See you later."