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“That one on the top works,” he said. “Or at least, it was working a few days ago. Used to be mine.”

“So why aren’t you using it anymore?” I asked him. I was trying to be sharp, but that doesn’t often work for me. Give me an hour or two and I’m sharp as a box cutter, but sometimes in the moment, things don’t work out as good as I’d want.

“I got a better one,” he said. I couldn’t really argue with that. He could probably have made one that was better. Shit, I could probably have made one that was better.

“But it records?”

He just looked at me.

“Records and plays?”

“No, kid. It does everything else, just doesn’t record or play.”

“So if it doesn’t record or play, what’s the point . . .” Then I realized he was being sarcastic, so of course I felt pretty dumb.

“And you never had any trouble with it?”

“Depends what you mean by trouble.”

“Like . . . with recording? Or playing?” I couldn’t think of another way of putting it.

“No.”

“So what sort of trouble did you have?”

“If this conversation lasts any longer, I’ll have to put the price up. Otherwise it’s not worth my time.”

“Does it come with a remote?”

“I can find you one.”

So I just dug in my pocket for the fifty bucks, handed it to him, and went and got the thing off the top of the pile. He found a remote and put it in my jacket pocket. And then, as I was walking out, he said this weird thing.

“Just . . . forget it.”

“What?”

“I did.”

“What?”

This guy was old-school Berkeley, if you know what I mean. Gray beard, gray ponytail, dirty old vest.

“Cos it can’t know anything, right? It’s just a fucking VCR. What can it know? Nothing.”

“No, man,” I said. Because I thought I had a handle on him then, you know? He was nuts, plain and simple. Weed had destroyed his mind. “No, it can’t know anything. Like you say, what could it know?”

He smiled then, like he was really relieved, and it was only when he smiled that I could tell how sad he looked before.

“I really needed to hear that,” he said.

“Happy to oblige.”

“I’m forty-nine years old, and I got a lot to do. I got a novel to write.”

“You’d better hurry.”

“Really?” He looked worried again. I didn’t know what the fuck I’d said.

“Well. You know. Hurry in your own time.” Because I didn’t care when he wrote his stupid novel. Why should I?

“Right. Right. Hey, thanks.”

“No problem.”

And that was it. I thought about what he’d said for maybe another minute and a half, and then forgot about him. For a while, anyway.

So I was all set. I had a band rehearsal that night, so I wired the VCR up to the TV in my room, and then I did a little test on it. I recorded some news show for a couple minutes, and then I played it back—A-OK. I checked out the remote—fine. I even put my tape of The Matrix in the machine, to see what kind of picture quality I was getting. (The kind of picture quality you get on a fifty-buck VCR was what I was getting.) Then I worked out the timer, and set it for the last part of that night’s Lakers game. Everything was cool. Or rather, everything would have been cool, if my mom hadn’t decided to interfere, although as it turned out, it was a good sort of interference.

What happened was, I got a lift home from Martha’s dad. With Martha in the car. I mean, of course Martha was in the car, because that was why her dad had turned up at the community center, but, you know. Martha was in the car. Which meant . . . well, not too much, if you really want to analyze it that closely. I didn’t talk a whole lot. Like I said, give me a few hours to think about it and I’m William fucking Shakespeare; I’m just not so good in real time. I guess it’s my dad’s genes coming through. He can write OK dialogue if he has enough time to think about it—like a year. But ask him the simplest question, like “What’s going on with you and Mom?” and he’s, you know, “Duh, yeah, well, blah.” Thanks, Dad. That’s made things real clear.

Anyway, we got in the car, and . . . Oh—first of all, I should tell you that it’s turning into