Benji lived in a large house a few blocks from mine; it was all glass and steel surfaces and reminded me of Cameron’s house in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, where everything was cold and beautiful and he wasn’t allowed to touch anything. Benji’s dad was some kind of banker who worked long hours and was never home. His mom’s job was to make sure the house always looked perfect. Benji’s dad wouldn’t let them hire a cleaner and Benji ordered his mom around the house like a servant, but she didn’t seem to mind. I guess it made her feel useful.
We lay on Benji’s bed listening to Nirvana, hands in our pockets, heads barely touching. Next to us was a tray of freshly baked cookies Mrs Connor had just served us, the chocolate soft and warm. Benji’s cat Freddie was curled at our feet. The CD was a bootleg of Kurt Cobain laying down tracks in the studio, strumming an acoustic guitar and trying to work out what chords to use. We preferred to listen to bootleg recordings. They were raw and real, the distilled essence of the musician before the mixing desk came in and smoothed everything over. In the half-light of Benji’s lamp it was easy to imagine Kurt sitting in the corner of the room, head down, chipped fingernails picking at the strings of an old Martin guitar; but if you turned to look at him he would disappear, dissolving into the air, and all that would be left were the last picked notes, floating into the night.
Benji sighed. I knew what was coming.
‘I can’t believe she got away with it,’ he moaned.
I groaned. ‘For the last time, the evidence pointing to Courtney is entirely circumstantial.’
‘How can you still believe her? Even after that documentary where they interviewed the bounty hunter? He swore Courtney hired him to kill Kurt.’
‘Benji, the dude had no teeth.’
‘Even so—how do you explain the amount of heroin that was in Cobain’s system? He was so doped up that even medical experts say there is no way he could have lifted that gun and pulled the trigger after shooting up so much.’
‘Ever heard of functioning junkies?’
‘There’s functioning and then there’s superhuman. The woman’s as guilty as OJ.’
‘Okay, hold up,’ I said, getting agitated. ‘You’re just persecuting her because she’s a strong woman who acts the way she wants to and doesn’t give a shit what anyone thinks of her. You and the rest of society have cast her as the murdering wife because you don’t know how else to handle her. She scares the crap out of you so you cut her down. She’s not a murderer—she’s a survivor.’
Benji stretched back and pouted. ‘Yeah? Well her solo album sucked.’
I sat up and looked around. Benji’s walls were decorated with restraint, a poster here or there of his favourite bands, each of them carefully framed. Green Day. Fall Out Boy. A large portion of the space was taken up by a glass cabinet filled with memorabilia and illuminated by down lights. It was here that he kept his most prized possessions. A stone from Sharon Tate’s fireplace. Phil Hartman’s Welcome Mat, still dirty with his footprints. Pride of place was a script for the movie Animal House, signed by John Belushi. The scrawl was barely recognisable but Benji explained it away by saying Belushi must have been high at the time he signed it. Which made the script worth even more to him. For Benji, Belushi under the influence and living on the edge was more valuable than the healthy, sober version.
I had my own collection at Aunt Lynette’s but it was much smaller and not as well organised. Lynette had not been expecting another occupant in her house, at least not one who would require an entire bedroom, so my living space was cramped, compared to Benji’s spacious quarters.
‘What’s your favourite Nirvana song?’ Benji asked.
Another Benji trait. Always cataloguing, passing a critical eye over everything. It was the disease of our generation. We were constantly distilling the world into lists, classifying our lives according to what was hot and what was not. Music. Movies. TV Shows. Countries you most want to visit. 101 things to do before you die. Ironically, the more obscure the list item, the greater chance it had of being considered hot, which in turn would inevitably make it mainstream. It was a vicious cycle.
‘“Smells Like Teen Spirit”,’ I answered after some consideration.
‘Amateur hour. Only people who have no understanding of Nirvana’s work would make such an obvious choice.’
‘And what’s yours, Lester Bangs?’
‘“Radio Friendly Unit Shifter”,’ he replied, citing one of their most obscure singles. He put his hands behind his head with smug satisfaction.
‘You’re a dick, Benji.’
He leapt up and went to sit at his desk. Annoyed by Benji’s sudden movement, Freddie the cat jumped off the bed and sauntered away. In front of his PC and its enormous twin monitors, Benji squinted with concentration and clicked the mouse furiously. Moving rapidly from one screen to the next were album covers that he’d cut and pasted and dumped into folders.
I turned on the TV and watched America’s Next Top Models strut across the screen. I glanced down at my own body, not exactly chubby but definitely a little dumpy. I’d been wearing the same plain black T-shirt for days and my jeans were tatty. Grooming had never been a priority with me. I usually threw on whatever was comfortable. With hippies for parents, I guess it couldn’t have turned out any other way.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I asked as Benji cursed under his breath.
‘Looking for cover art,’ he said, not taking his eyes off the screen. ‘For my iPod. If the artwork is missing it ruins the effect, you know that.’
‘How many more covers do you have to download?’
‘About five hundred.’
‘Five hundred! How long is it going to take you?’
‘Not sure. I’ve been working on it for a few days. I reckon in a few more hours I’ll have them all.’
‘Is it really that important?’
Benji swivelled in his chair. ‘Well, it’s not cover flow if all the covers aren’t there, is it?’
For a supposed punk Benji was the most pedantic person I knew. He made sure his mom ironed his band T-shirts perfectly and that his cargo pants had creases. I stared at the ceiling. Sometimes when Benji and I were talking like this, a splinter of despair would work its way into my heart. I could feel the wasted moments ticking away, and wondered whether large portions of my life would be lost to inane conversations about cover art and about whether Nirvana’s mainstream hits were better than their B sides. Sometimes I felt like my head was so full of trivia there was no room for anything of real substance. I didn’t care too much about it. The noise kept out things I would rather not think about.
‘You wanna stay the night?’ Benji asked, scratching at his arm as he spoke, like it was no big deal. Benji was always asking me to stay over but I never did because I didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. I used to stay over all the time: Mrs Connor would make up the spare bedroom for me and fill my private bathroom with little unopened toiletries. It felt like staying in a hotel, and I’m sure if I’d picked up the phone in the middle of the night and asked for a sandwich I’d have probably got one. But I didn’t stay over anymore.
‘Nah, it’s cool,’ I said. ‘Lynette’s expecting me for dinner.’
‘Since when have you cared about that?’
‘I don’t care. I’ve just got shit to do. Comprende?’
‘Whatever. You still up for tomorrow?’
Was he kidding? I had been looking forward to this expedition for ages. ‘Cielo Drive,’ I said.
‘Cielo Drive,’ he repeated, and the name hung between us like a talisman.
‘Benji?
‘Yes, Hilda?’
I looked at my nails, which were chewed and sore. ‘What do you suppose that guy was so nervous about today?’
‘Nervous?’
‘You know, the guy in Echo Park. Hank. The way he freaked out when we knocked on the door, it was like he was hiding something.’
Benji didn’t look up from the screen. ‘I dunno. Maybe he’s got some unpaid bills. You know they can’t turn off your electricity unless they tell you in person. They have to make sure you’re not on dialysis or something. An electricity company once cut off the supply to this old woman’s house in winter, and she froze to death in her chair.’
‘No…It was something else. He seemed really scared, like he was expecting someone else.’
‘Maybe he’s the Unabomber. Or a serial killer. Maybe he had pieces of dead bodies in his fridge.’
‘I doubt he has the strength for anything like that. He looked pretty old.’
‘What do you care? He was just a stupid kook.’
‘We should have at least stayed for a bit. He seemed lonely.’
Benji didn’t respond. I looked over again at his collection of artefacts, the stones from Sharon Tate’s fireplace in a little zip-lock bag on a shelf by themselves. I stood up and walked across to examine its contents.
‘I saw an episode of ‘Ghost Chasers’ last week,’ I said, holding the stones in the palm of my hand. ‘A woman bought a piano that turned out to be haunted. From the moment they had it in the house all sorts of strange stuff started to happen. They think the piano belonged to a gangster who used to slam people’s fingers in it.’
‘So?’
‘So maybe having all this stuff in our houses is bad luck.’
‘Hey Hilda,’ Benji said, turning back to his computer. ‘You should see this video. It’s a guy getting screwed to death by a horse.’
I am the first to admit that my interests border on the macabre, but Benji’s obsessions were without boundaries. I put the stones down and grabbed my bag.
‘I’m out of here,’ I said, and Benji waved to me half-heartedly. As I walked to the door I heard the sound of a guy moaning in ecstasy, then the moans became groans, then screams. I closed the door behind me, and smiled at Mrs Connor on my way out.