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Tommy (Tommy & Alice) Friday, 3:00 p.m.
Investigating for the police had sounded interesting when we were all together and excited about the idea, but it turned out to be more difficult than I expected. I’d never done more than greet most of the men on my list, yet I was supposed to start a conversation that would reveal their place of residence on a specific date in 1967. There’s an old saying: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
My biggest problem was that I’m no actor. No matter how well I rehearsed my speech, I ended up sounding like a man desperate for conversation. For example: following one guy into the mail room, I pulled an envelope from my box and said, “Huh. A letter from Nashville, Tennessee.” He smiled in that vague way that indicates polite non-interest, but I went on. “I lived there when I was in my twenties. I suppose it’s changed a lot since then.”
“We stopped on our way down a while back,” the guy said. “Wife wanted to see Music City and all that.”
“That the only time you’ve been there?”
He gave me a look. “Yeah. Why do you ask?”
“Like I said, I wonder how different it is from when I was there.”
“Look it up on the internet.” He closed his mailbox and pocketed the key. “You can find out anything there.”
I got lucky a few times, finding men willing to talk about almost anything. One was ex-military and had been stationed in Germany from ’65 to ’70. After a session of pool volleyball, I struck up a conversation with a man from northern California who admitted he’d wandered the U.S. mainland through most of the sixties. “I was a vagabond hippie type back then,” he said, “looking for Nirvana.” He draped his towel around his neck, adding, “The perfect state of being, not the band.”
“Do you remember them all? Like, where were you in the summer of 1967?”
His wife had joined us, still toweling herself dry. “Taos, right, Ronnie? We sold art the whole summer that year.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Commercial images were big at that time. We took stuff we saw in ads and turned it into art: t-shirts with dish scrubbers and soup cans on them. We called it new realism, but it ended up known as pop art.”
“Oh, yeah, like Andy Warhol.”
My comment made the woman’s lips twist, and I guessed there was supposed to be more to pop art than one guy.
“We’re big fans of Lichtenstein,” the man said. When I looked confused he added, “He made those large paintings of comic strip scenes, emphasizing the small dots of color that blend in the small print of a newspaper page.”
The wife added, “Geniuses like Lichtenstein and Warhol forced viewers to consider the fine line that exists between art and commercial design.”
“Right. Did you ever visit Nashville?”
They both laughed at the idea. “What’s in Nashville?” she asked. “Country music and a bunch of hicks.” Belatedly realizing that might offend me she added, “I mean, some people like it, but we’re more Bob Dylan than Buck Owens.”
It went on like that. Sometimes I was able to eliminate a man; other times my reward was a vague, “I’m not sure.” My failures were mostly due to my inability to come up with realistic reasons for asking. “I should stick to reading mysteries instead of trying to solve them,” I told Alice. “I make a horrible detective.”
“It’s not your fault you’re a bad liar.” She gave my arm a little squeeze. “In all cases except this one, it’s the way a man should be.”
