Read Not a Star and Otherwise Pandemonium for Free Online

be more interested in the happy ending, rather than the weird middle, which means I don’t have to take the Stephen King route.)
     
    But my argument for the video recorder was this: not only was I not making friends at the band rehearsals, but the rehearsals were actually stopping me from making friends. Here’s how that works: I go to rehearsals. We don’t have a VCR. (We left ours in L.A. with Dad, and for some insane reason Mom didn’t want to buy a replacement right away, I guess because we were supposed to read books and paint and play trumpets every night, like we were living in the Little House on the Prairie or something.) I can’t tape the NBA playoffs. I can’t talk about the games next day. Everyone thinks I’m a dweeb. Obvious, right? Not to her. I had to threaten to go back and live with Dad before she gave in, and even then she more or less told me I had to find the cheapest, crappiest machine in the Bay Area.
     
    Anyway, it’s pretty great, this place. It sells old TVs–like really old, Back-to-the-Future old–and guitars, and amps, and stereos and radios. And VCRs. I just asked the old hippy guy who runs the place for the cheapest one he had that actually worked, and he pointed me over to this pile right in the corner of the store.
    ‘That one on the top works,’ he said. ‘Or at least, it was working a few days ago. Used to be mine.’
    ‘So why aren’t you using it anymore?’ I asked him. I was trying to be sharp, but that doesn’t often work for me. Give me an hour or two and I’m sharp as a box cutter, but sometimes in the moment, things don’t work out as good as I’d want.
    ‘I got a better one,’ he said. I couldn’t really argue with that. He could probably have made one that was better. Shit, I could probably have made one that was better.
    ‘But it records?’
    He just looked at me.
    ‘Records and plays?’
    ‘No, kid. It does everything else, just doesn’t record or play.’
    ‘So if it doesn’t record or play, what’s the point…’ Then I realized he was being sarcastic, so of course I felt pretty dumb.
    ‘And you never had any trouble with it?’
    ‘Depends what you mean by trouble.’
    ‘Like…with recording? Or playing?’ I couldn’t think of another way of putting it.
    ‘No.’
    ‘So what sort of trouble did you have?’
    ‘If this conversation lasts any longer, I’ll have to put the price up. Otherwise it’s not worth my time.’
    ‘Does it come with a remote?’
    ‘I can find you one.’
    So I just dug in my pocket for the fifty bucks, handed it to him, and went and got the thing off the top of the pile. He found a remote and put it in my jacket pocket. And then, as I was walking out, he said this weird thing.
    ‘Just…forget it.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I did.’
    ‘What?’
    This guy was old-school Berkeley, if you know what I mean. Grey beard, grey pony-tail, dirty old vest.
    ‘Cos it can’t know anything, right? It’s just a fucking VCR. What can it know? Nothing.’
    ‘No, man,’ I said. Because I thought I had a handle on him then, you know? He was nuts, plain and simple. Weed had destroyed his mind. ‘No, it can’t know anything. Like you say, what could it know?’
    He smiled then, like he was really relieved, and it was only when he smiled that I could tell how sad he looked before.
    ‘I really needed to hear that,’ he said.
    ‘Happy to oblige.’
    ‘I’m forty-nine years old, and I got a lot to do. I got a novel to write.’
    ‘You’d better hurry.’
    ‘Really?’ He looked worried again. I didn’t know what the fuck I’d said.
    ‘Well. You know. Hurry in your own time.’ Because I didn’t care when he wrote his stupid novel. Why should I?
    ‘Right. Right. Hey, thanks.’
    ‘No problem.’
    And that was it. I thought about what he’d said for maybe another minute and a half, and then forgot about him. For a while, anyway.
     
    So I was all set. I had a band rehearsal that night, so I wired the VCR up to the TV in