Page 25 of The Music Demon

As she sat, she held out the box of cookies. After Gray took two, she set the box down, picked up her beer and said, “Girl trouble? Money trouble? Or crisis of conscience?”

He laughed. “You think I have a conscience?”

Cass smiled. “That was an artful dodge.”

“It’s none of those things. I’ve got a powerful curiosity about what it was like when you were my age.”

“You think I can remember that far back?”

Gray looked up to see Cass’s eyes twinkling with amusement. He’d bet his last dime that she could recall 1967 like it was yesterday.

“Expect so,” he replied.

“Well, you flatter me. So how old are you now?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Math isn’t my thing, but I believe that I was twenty-three in 1970.”

“Yeah? Well, let’s back it up a little. Like three years.”

“Ohhhhhhh. You want to know about 1967, the so-called Summer of Love.” He nodded. “Why? You going back to school? Got a paper due?”

“No.”

“What exactly is it you want to know?What was it likeis a pretty broad question.”

He looked at the face of his phone. “I’ve got two hours and forty-nine minutes. How much time you got?”

“Now there’s a deep question. None of us know how much time we’ve got.”

“Why’re you makin’ this hard?”

She chuckled. “You’re not the only one with a healthy curiosity. Kid from across the street comes over and all of a sudden wants a dump of info from ancient history. I gotta wonder what’s going on.”

“Okay. Let’s say I was writing a sci-fi story about somebody like me time traveling back to 1967. What would I need to know to prepare for it?”

Seeing that Gray was serious, she said, finally, “Well. It wasn’t all flowers and fucking. All that Age of Aquarius hopefulness and desire to escape into drugs was a backlash against a darkness that had taken root inside middle class suburbs and grown like black mold. You know how a room could be freshly painted sunshine yellow and look perfect, but at the same time the walls hidden behind the closet door could be dripping with toxic shit?”

Gray’s brow furrowed slightly. “I… Not really.”

She sighed deeply, looked out at the backyard, and took a swig of Dos Equis. “You really want the whole story? Not just Soho chic and psychedelia. The underbelly?”

“Everything.”

She studied him silently for a few beats. “Well, it starts and ends in pure chaos. The distance of a few decades gives a person a kind of a big picture view from above. Maybe I’ve got too much time for thinking about such things, but at a certain point - removed from the moment, the dots start connecting all on their own.”

“Tell me all of it.”

Gray saw it on her face the moment she’d made up her mind to spill the good, the bad, and ugly, and he was ready to take it all in. There was a decision to be made. A big one. And he wanted to be forearmed with information before he made it.

“Not really sure where to begin. I know you studied World War II in school.” He wagged his head as if to say ‘studied’ might be an exaggeration. “Well, you’re aware that there was a big war. Right?”

“Even I get that World War means big.”

She held the box of ginger snaps out inviting him to take more, then changed her mind and handed over the box. “You had dinner?”

“If Jack in the Box qualifies as food, then yeah.”