else to Jimmy and then draw another note on the card. He had a stack of three-by-five cards with a rubber band around them jammed in the pocket of his pocket tee. He was in his forties. He had bad eyes and long hair thinning on top pulled back into a ponytail. He wore orange jeans. He was skinny and tall, no ass at all. That was a line a lyricist friend had put to one of Chris’s melody lines once, presumptuously trying to turn it into a song.

Chris never spoke to him again.

He was a musician, a real musician, the kind of shack-out-back artist who had twenty thousand dollars’ worth of computers and synthesizers and keyboards—and a safety pin holding his glasses together. To pay the rent, he played song demo dates and commercial jingles and the occasional session for a Touched by an Angel, but what he really wanted to do was . . . write atonal symphonies and then not play them for anyone. A few years back, Jimmy and Angel had encouraged him to apply for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and he did, scrawling, Go Screw Yourself! across the application.

Surprisingly, he was turned down.

“Disco got a total bad rap. Repetitive. You want repetitive? You ever listen to Vivaldi, or, better yet, Ravel?”

Chris picked up a fork.

“What is this?” he said.

“A fork,” Jimmy said.

Chris picked up a spoon. “What is this?”

“A spoon.”

Chris started nodding his head. “Which is better?” he said.

“I hear you.”

“You got a steak, I’ll tell you whether a fork is better than a spoon.”

“I get what you’re saying,” Jimmy said.

“Most people don’t,” the musician said. “Sadly.”

Their food came. Chris got a bowl of soup the size of a hubcap, bean soup. Jimmy had just ordered a plate of steamed carrots. Chris picked up his spoon, wiped it off with a napkin.

Jimmy said, “I drove by there. Big Daddy’s.”

Chris slurped up the first too-h ot spoonful of soup. He kept shoveling it in. He ate like a musician, like a musician who hadn’t eaten in a week.

“How’s the soup?” Jimmy said.

“It’s all right.”

Ten years ago when Chris’s mother died, Jimmy had gotten him into an apartment and the first day he’d had to show him how to make canned soup. A week later, he introduced him to SpaghettiOs.

“So, I drove by there, Big Daddy’s,” Jimmy said. “Where it used to be.”

“And it’s a Starbucks now,” Chris said.

“A Kinko’s.”

“But you get what I mean . . .”

Jimmy got what he meant.

“I don’t get down there to the Marina anymore,” Chris said. “It takes four buses.” He took out a new three-by-five card and wrote a note to himself. “I’ll burn you a CD. The stuff you should be listening to. You ever hear Cerrone?”

“Love in C Minor.”

Chris was impressed. “How old are you, man?” he said. “I’ve never been able to tell.”

Jimmy let the question go unanswered. “Here’s what I need,” he said. “You know anybody who spun at Big Daddy’s?”

Chris was to the bottom of his bean soup. “Could I get another bowl?”

“Sure.”

Chris motioned to the waitress for another bowl, pointed to it like it was a Scotch and soda.

“I knew Slip Tony,” he said. “But he spelled it with an E instead of a Y, like tone. Tone Espinosa. He was the best. He wouldn’t say a word all night. He had all these imports. He was the first guy I knew of to use three tables. He’d throw something over something with something else underneath and you couldn’t believe what you were hearing. Spoken word. He’d lay in a guy saying a poem or narration for a training film for air-conditioning repair. There wasn’t anybody in L.A. who was a better DJ—except for maybe about a dozen gay guys in little clubs you never heard of playing tea dances on Sunday afternoons.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“Dead. It’s funny,” Chris said, then caught himself. “Well, I don’t mean being dead . . . He became a cop. He was on a gang unit, right down in there, Venice south. Shot dead. Two years after Big Daddy’s, maybe by some slick who two years earlier was out on the floor, thinking how cool Slip was there in the booth, his head over sideways, half a headphone on his shoulder.”

“You know anybody else from Big Daddy’s? Anybody who’s still alive?”

The second bowl of soup came. “I’d also like another one to go,” Chris said to the waitress. He looked