Lola Bensky Read online

  Renia was always wriggling or, more accurately, wrenching herself out of Edek’s grips or pinches or pats. Renia usually shook her head as she twisted herself out of Edek’s grasp, as though she were far too busy for this sort of playfulness. When Edek came home after work, he always tried to grab Renia or pat her on the bum. He would also try to stroke her hair or hold her in his arms. He never succeeded. Renia always got away.

  Edek had loved Renia for a long time. He had been smitten by her the first time they met. Renia was twelve, almost thirteen. Edek was nineteen, good-looking and wealthy. None of this swayed Renia. She didn’t want a boyfriend. She didn’t want to get married. She wanted to work hard and be a doctor, a paediatrician. Renia came top of every class she was in and tutored her fellow students in maths, science and history, four nights a week. Edek had had to work hard to inch his way into Renia’s heart. And Hitler’s arrival, several years later, had clinched the deal. Renia and Edek were married a few days before they and all the Jews of Lodz were forced to leave their homes and imprisoned in the ghetto.

  Lola was almost home. She knew she had to clear up an argument Pimp was having with Schlomo. Pimp had already been very irritated that morning by Harry, who had remained in the Ultra-Private Detective Agency’s small East Village office when Pimp and Schlomo had moved to SoHo. Harry had become very attached to the area and to the three delis where he bought the different components of his lunch every day. And Pimp had been unable to get out of the last year of the lease. Harry had cleared everything off the desk Pimp used when she was in the East Village office. When she had dropped in to do some work, she had been unable to find the documents she was looking for or her reading glasses.

  ‘You don’t have to be so anal,’ Pimp had said to Harry.

  Harry had been offended. ‘I am not anal,’ he said. ‘I am fastidious. That’s how we find who and what we are looking for.’

  ‘You are beyond fastidious,’ Pimp screamed. ‘And being beyond fastidious is anal.’

  Lola had been puzzled by why she was trying to differentiate between fastidious and anal. And had distracted herself by wondering if she could scream like Pimp. She thought her voice would probably seize up and come out as a small screech.

  Pimp screamed at everyone. She regularly screamed at Schlomo.

  ‘Why are you scrimming, scrimming, scrimming?’ Schlomo would say to Pimp.

  ‘I’m not scrimming. I’m screaming.’ Pimp would shout. Schlomo’s Yiddish accent drove her crazy.

  Pimp’s recent argument with Schlomo had been about equipment. Schlomo loved gadgets. He had decided he needed the Bionic Ear with Booster Kit he’d seen in a catalogue. The Bionic Ear with Booster Kit magnified faint or distant sounds, supposedly with remarkable clarity.

  ‘You’ve already got that Parabolic Ear that you never use,’ Pimp had said.

  ‘The Parabolic Ear is good for sounds of nature up to a hundred yards away,’ Schlomo said. ‘There are no sounds of nature in SoHo.’

  ‘Why did we buy it?’ Pimp screamed.

  ‘Don’t scrim,’ said Schlomo. ‘We bought it because I thought it was good for voices. It doesn’t work too good at all for voices.’

  ‘Do you speak English at home with your wife?’ Pimp said.

  ‘Of course we speak English,’ said Schlomo. ‘Now you are acting offensive.’

  ‘It should be acting in an offensive manner or being offensive,’ said Pimp.

  Schlomo shrugged. ‘I need a Bionic Ear with Booster Kit,’ he said. ‘I was following the man whose wife says he is no longer interested in sex with her and I can tell you from the way he was looking at the woman he met that he is still very interested in sex. But I could not hear a word they were saying. If I want to hear what people are saying, I have to stand so close that they can smell me.’

  ‘Do you smell?’ said Pimp.

  ‘Everybody does,’ said Schlomo.

  ‘You’ve got all this equipment you don’t use,’ Pimp said to Schlomo. ‘What happened to the Memo Dictation Pen Recorder?’

  ‘I thought I could pretend to write something when I was recording a suspect, but it didn’t work out,’ Schlomo said.

  Lola sympathised with Pimp. Schlomo did have a lot of gadgets, none of which he appeared to use. He had ordered the Memo Dictation Pen Recorder and then discovered that he felt stupid waving a pen in the direction of someone standing in front of him. He had ordered a Wall Probe Microphone that could pick up even faint sounds through any solid surface before discovering that there was rarely a wall between him and the person he was following.

  Harry thought that Schlomo was hopeless with equipment. ‘Schlomo put the vehicle tracking device on his own car,’ Harry had pointed out when the three of them were last together.

  ‘Harry, I do not need your help,’ Schlomo had said.

  ‘Schlomo, you need somebody’s help,’ Pimp had said.

  Lola needed to help Pimp solve the problem of Schlomo and the Sabbath. Schlomo observed the Sabbath. He left work early every Friday afternoon and was out of reach until after sunset on Saturday. Schlomo had to stop whatever he was doing on Friday afternoons and get home before sunset. Last Friday he had been minutes away from finding the identity of the blackmailer of the head of the New York chain of Best Ever Burger restaurants, when he’d had to pack up and rush home.

  ‘Wouldn’t God have been happier if we’d caught the blackmailer?’ Pimp had said.

  ‘No,’ Schlomo had replied very firmly. This was the Ultra-Private Detective Agency’s first case of blackmail. The owner of the Best Ever Burger chain was one of their richest clients. Lola had wondered if Pimp would be able to find a private detective who wanted to work on a sporadic basis on Friday afternoons and Saturdays.

  Lola was in her study. She looked at the last page she had written. Schlomo had decided to take up yoga. Oh no, Lola thought. When had that happened? Then she remembered. It had happened at seven o’clock this morning. It was too late to change it now. Schlomo was already enrolled in the yoga school around the corner from Lola’s loft.

  6

  Nobody was doing yoga when Lola Bensky was twenty. Not even the brand-new hippies at the Monterey International Pop Festival. The first person Lola Bensky saw when she walked into the Monterey County Fairgrounds was Jimi Hendrix. He was sitting on a folding chair outside the office building that functioned as the administrative centre of the Monterey International Pop Festival, a three-day festival billed as a weekend of music, love and flowers. Inside, Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas was working frantically, typing and answering the phones, and her husband John Phillips was still adjusting the concert schedule in his grey fur hat, which, despite the heat, he never seemed to remove.

  Jimi Hendrix was doing something to the strings of his guitar. He was wearing a black hat with several silver brooches and badges pinned to the brim, a maroon jacket and a silk floral-patterned shirt. Large pink and green flowers were printed all over the cream silk. Around his neck were five necklaces of varying lengths. The shortest, a chunky silver necklace, sat snugly around his neck and the longest dropped to just above his waist, a few inches away from the bold silver chain belted around his jeans. He had two large silver rings on the last two fingers of his left hand.

  Lola admired the way Jimi Hendrix dressed and decorated himself. At first glance, it looked as though he was wearing a technicolour mishmash of odds and ends. A hodgepodge of garments and adornments. But his outfits contained a surprising harmony, held together by his lean frame and a low-lying, slow-burning fervour.

  Lola didn’t want to disturb Jimi Hendrix. He seemed to be engrossed in his guitar strings. She thought he probably wouldn’t remember her. She looked down and realised that she was wearing fishnet tights. Not the same pair that she’d had on when she’d seen him in London. But they were still fishnet tights. The net in this pair had more stretch and didn’t dig into her over-abundance of flesh. With this pair, she didn’t have to pad the inside of her thighs with
tissues and worry about leaving traces of shredded tissue particles in her wake.

  Jimi Hendrix looked up and saw Lola. He paused for a moment and then smiled. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How are you doing? You never did come around and see me in my hair curlers.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Lola. ‘Although I was very interested in seeing where you placed the hair curlers if they weren’t in straight lines.’

  ‘I know exactly where to put hair curlers,’ Jimi Hendrix said.

  ‘That’s what you said last time,’ said Lola.

  ‘Your hair is still straight but you’ve had it cut,’ Jimi Hendrix said. Lola was very surprised. She found it hard to believe he’d noticed that her formerly long, ironed-straight hair was now short, straight hair. She had had a Mary Quant blunt-cut bob before she’d left London. She regretted it. Having a perky haircut made her feel a bit at odds with herself. She wasn’t really the perky sort.

  ‘It looks as though you’ve had it permed straight,’ Jimi Hendrix said.

  ‘How can you tell?’ said Lola.

  ‘I’ve had my hair permed straight before, and I recognise that very straight look,’ he said.

  Lola didn’t think this was a good thing. If Jimi Hendrix could recognise permed-straight hair, then a lot of other people probably could, too. And the Monterey International Pop Festival, with its emphasis on love and peace and all things natural, was possibly not the place to turn up wearing artificially permed hair.

  ‘I shouldn’t have had it straightened,’ Lola said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Jimi Hendrix.

  Lola consoled herself by thinking that few people were as knowledgeable about hair as Jimi Hendrix. What was she doing, anyway, Lola thought, talking to Jimi Hendrix about permed hair and bad haircuts?

  ‘You are a groovy chick, man,’ Jimi Hendrix said. Lola laughed. ‘You don’t think you’re a groovy chick, do you?’ he said.

  ‘Not really,’ said Lola. She had never thought of herself as a chick or as groovy. Chicks, especially groovy chicks, had long blond hair, slim hips and bare, shapely legs. They weren’t covering the pudginess of their thighs and calves with lace or fishnet tights. Groovy chicks could also dance in rhythm and with abandon, on the dance floor or on the beach, and were not, on the whole, Jewish. Lola would have had to undergo a divine transformation to be categorised as a groovy chick. She would have had to reconfigure history, alter her genes, and catch malaria to lose weight.

  ‘You are a cool chick,’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘I’m being serious.’ He looked at her. ‘You’ve got a very pretty face. I don’t measure girls by their appearance,’ he said. ‘Some people go for appearance. I don’t.’ Lola felt embarrassed. Was he telling her what she knew was the truth, that she was too fat to be attractive? She didn’t think so. His face looked too earnest to be saying anything hurtful.

  ‘Looks might make you want to be with a girl for a second or two, but that’s all,’ Jimi Hendrix said. ‘There are other things that girls have to offer besides their looks. I don’t know exactly what, but you can feel little things about a person that aren’t as obvious as looks.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ Lola said. ‘Choosing a person on the basis of their looks is a pretty superficial choice.’

  ‘But you still don’t think you’re a groovy chick, do you?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Lola.

  A pale-haired guy with a headband made out of feathers came up to Jimi Hendrix. ‘Hey, man, I met you in Buffalo a few years ago,’ he said. ‘You come from Buffalo, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘I’m from Seattle, Washington. I was in Buffalo for a couple of months, but I left. I was too cold there.’

  Lola wondered what made Jimi Hendrix so unfailingly polite. Too many of the men in the rock world were arrogant. The rock stars, the road managers, the assistants. It seemed that just being in the orbit of a celebrity could induce a disdain for anyone outside that small cosmos.

  ‘Wasn’t it just as cold in Seattle?’ said the feathered-headband man.

  ‘No,’ said Jimi Hendrix. ‘Seattle has a different kind of cold. Seattle has a nice coldness. It doesn’t cut into you the way the coldness in Buffalo does.’

  ‘My father used to say that about Poland,’ Lola said. ‘He said he never felt the cold in Poland. He said it was a good cold. The sort of cold that didn’t get into your bones. I think maybe he didn’t feel the cold because he felt at home there.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Jimi Hendrix.

  Mr Feathered Headband wandered away, probably less than captivated about what Edek felt about the cold in Poland. Lola tugged at the sides of her purple and white dress. She was sure that last month this dress hadn’t been that tight. She had just sent Renia a postcard saying that she was on a diet. She figured out that she had about ten days before the postcard arrived to start the diet. That way she wouldn’t be lying.

  The fairground was beginning to fill up. People were streaming in. Nobody paid much attention to Jimi Hendrix. Despite his hit records in England, few people in America had heard of Jimi Hendrix. The band, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, had never been on American television, they had had very little exposure on American radio and hardly any press.

  ‘Nice to see you, again,’ Jimi Hendrix said to Lola.

  ‘Nice to see you, too,’ said Lola. She waved to him as she walked off and then felt stupid. Her wave was the prolonged wave of a small child. She looked back. Jimi Hendrix was waving and smiling.

  The Monterey International Pop Festival was planned as a coming together, with love, of people from all over the world. Bands from America, England, South Africa and India were booked to appear. It was the first large festival to include bands from all over America. Many of the bands, despite their fame, had never met each other.

  The festival program exhorted everyone to be happy, be free, wear flowers, bring bells and have a festival. Lola thought that the thousands of people who had attended the festival had listened.

  She had never seen a crowd of people looking so happy. Person after person was smiling. Large smiles that radiated a sense of optimism and a sense of brotherhood. Lola had never seen a crowd of people so at ease with each other. Trees and cars and vans and babies and young children and large and small dogs were festooned with signs saying ‘Love’ and ‘Peace’. And then there were the flowers. There were flowers everywhere. Almost everyone had flowers. Flowers in their hair, around their necks, attached to their garments or their sunglasses or painted onto their faces.

  And the clothes. The clothes were wild. Lola was mesmerised by the clothes. She watched a woman in a purple paisley jacket, with matching purple paisley shoes, share a sandwich with her dog. The dog was wearing a purple paisley vest. There were men in psychedelic shirts and girls in long floral dresses. Others were in T-shirts and shorts or tweed jackets with leather patches or military trousers and jackets emblazoned with gold bands and embroidered emblems. Several young women had short summer dresses with black tights and black knee-high boots. There was no uniform. And no sense of uniformity apart from the palpable, almost concrete feeling of goodwill.

  Music was being played over the sound system. Couples were dancing on the grass. Others were walking or sitting or eating. Eating fresh fruit. Lola had never seen so many people eating fruit. Everyone seemed to have an apple or an orange or a piece of watermelon. As though fruit were a symbol of a fresh start.

  Lola felt as though she had landed on another planet. Was she witnessing the beginning of a revolution? She knew that it was possible for the world to change overnight. For Renia, the future had changed. Overnight. It had spun on its axis and cracked and crazed and fractured. It was split into pieces with fissures and chinks and splinters. Overnight, everything had changed. One minute Renia was a beautiful and studious teenager. The next minute she was, like all the other Jews of Lodz, a bedraggled prisoner, imprisoned in a universe bereft of sustenance of almost every sort.

  Lola was offered an orange by a young man
in a Black Watch tartan kilt and a Black Watch tartan headband around his head. He took the orange out of the back of an old station wagon that was filled with boxes of oranges. ‘Thank you,’ said Lola.

  ‘You’re so welcome,’ he said, and bowed with a flourish.

  The congregation of Temple Beth El had set up a store where you could buy pastrami sandwiches. There was a soul-food stand and the Monterey Kiwanis, part of an international foundation that helped children in need, were cooking fresh corn on the cob and serving it, hot, on a stick. In other parts of the fairground you could buy macro-biotic food, popcorn or posters or brooches or pins and paper dresses.

  There were a lot of policemen at the festival. The police in their shiny blue helmets were also smiling. Quite a few of them had flowers tucked into their helmet straps. Lola didn’t think she’d even try to describe this scene in her postcard to Renia.

  She saw Brian Jones wandering around, almost ethereal in his blondness and draped in a pink cape with what looked like more than one patterned silk scarf around his neck and a patterned silk shirt. Lola knew that Brian Jones loved clothes. He was often dressed in layers of satin and lace and necklaces and frills. His flamboyant style had made him a fashion icon of sorts in England. He looked as though he was in a semi-dream. Partly removed from everything around him. Lola was due to interview him in less than an hour. She had heard that he was hypersensitive, a bit jumpy and often stoned. She had been told he took a lot of Mandrax, a sedative and muscle relaxant similar in effect to barbiturates, along with a stash of other drugs.

  Lola had seen some childhood photographs of Brian Jones. He hadn’t looked like a happy child. His mother was a piano teacher and his father an aeronautical engineer who also played the piano and led the church choir. Despite his middle-class upbringing, Brian Jones already looked lost.