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back. In it I was positioned insome nondescript Mar Vista garage exactly as I was then, bent over a set of turntables, face barely visible, left shoulder awkwardly raised to my ear to hold the headphone in place. Fingertips freshly licked and resting lightly on the vinyl as if I were testing a hot iron’s readiness. My Piru-red XXXL T-shirt with the words TRADER JOE’S/PRONTO MARKET silk-screened just above the breast pocket, billowing away from my scrawny body. Blaze in the background, in profile, Locs sunglasses, black wool beanie pulled down past his ears, frozen in mid–pop lock, a contorted Toltec testimonial to post-Hispanic Mesoamericana. Behind him, leaning against the garage wall among the gardening tools and surfboards, a multidysfunctional lineup of West-side hoods, homies, and honeys of all races, intellects, and loyalties to Laker basketball. I looked at the photograph and knew then that all I knew was sound, and that sound would be all that I’d ever know.
    â€œThat was incredible, dude.”
    It was Blaze. He was holding two cheap but intricate-looking pewter beer steins, two six-packs of beer, and singing the Löwenbräu commercial: “Here’s to good friends / Tonight is kind of special / The beer will pour, must say something more somehow/Tonight let it be Löwenbräu.”
    â€œIs that Löwenbräu?”
    â€œNo, I’m just singing the song—my sister wouldn’t send me some shit we could steal from Trader Joe’s, this is the unpronounceable shit.”
    Apparently Blaze’s older sister, Mariela, a tank mechanic stationed in Germany, had sent him a case of that strong leathery beer we loved so much. Beer that, no matter how much we drank, never left us with a hangover, only an urge to obey orders.
    As the beer percolated in the steins, we clanked them together.
    â€œTo the Reinheitsgebot.”
    â€œReinheitsgebot!”
    â€œWhat was that radical stuff you were playing?”
    â€œI’m trying to find the perfect beat.”
    â€œThat was damn close, bro. Remember that offshore storm senior year when we went up to Zuma? Set after perfectly timed set of glassy eight footers, steep-ass take-offs, big barrels, remember that?”
    â€œYeah, even the sunset session was fucking excellent.”
    â€œIf there had been five miles per hour less wind, it would have been absolutely perfect conditions.”
    â€œThe wind made the shoulders just a tad too gnarly.”
    â€œWell, that’s what your mix sounds like. It’s easily the best beat I’ve ever heard and probably the best beat I’ll ever hear, but it’s five miles per hour too windy.”
    The beer and the weed complemented each other well. I was drunk and high at the same time. Close my left eye and I was high, shut my right and I was drunk.
    High.
    Drunk.
    High.
    Drunk.
    I squinted through the mental fog and looked at the detail on the stein. The castles, elks, and mustachioed Kaisers came to life. A beer maiden, her hair in thick sausage curls, whispered my name.
    Over the next few months I set about composing my perfect beat, whittling off a mile per hour of wind here and a couple of knots there. Eventually I succeeded in splicing together a two-minute-and-forty-seven-second amalgamation of samples, street recordings, and original phrases. It was with some trepidation that I played it for Blaze and the rest of the Beard Scratchers. The Beard Scratchers being the members of our record pool, and so named because of our capricious yet squandered intellectualism,the way we listened to jazz with our faces pinched in agony as if we were suffering from migraine headaches as much as from our scruffy and chronically itchy chins. Though the Beard Scratchers, like most DJs, were inveterate biters, incorrigible beat snatchers who would rip off any rhythm or melody not copyrighted in triplicate and claim it as their own, I wasn’t worried about anyone stealing it.