The earliest memory I have that can be linked to a known date is the Kennedy assassination, which occurred just after my fourth birthday in 1963. I certainly have what feel to be older visions, of faces and mental snapshots of rooms and such, but nothing verifiable. This means we were too young to have gotten infected with the original strain of Beatlemania. I was two and a half years older than Tess and held only fuzzy memories of their arrival three months after JFK (mainly, I recalled a stupid cartoon show, voiced by pretend Beatles). Save for Mom’s kitchen radio eternally set on “Kountry KAYO,” music was never a big part of our lives until Tess located the Dreampurple beauty in the sixties. It was like her to support a dream that died because it had died, to root through the cold ashes of torched martyrs for moods and glimmers. Tess in all ways was all about the beautiful loser. It made sense that big winners like the Beatles had to break up before she could like them. Still, she once told me that she didn’t trust the Beatles “all the way” until Lennon was killed. I understood.

Albums used to come with cool stuff in them; you’d almost always get a poster from the big acts (Cheech and Chong released one that had a giant rolling paper in it). The White Album came with a montage poster, but I can barely remember it because Tess never fixed it to the wall, for she liked to read the lyrics that were printed on the back, and it eventually went wherever such things go after a time. But I have the four pictures that were also included memorized. Paper reprints of 11 by 8 color headshots of each Beatle. I can close my eyes and see them: Paul needs a shave, John looks unhappy about posing, George conveys a desire to be taken seriously, and Ringo appears to be high on something.

Although Tess was already too human to live long, she was still a ten-year-old girl who did stuff like tack pictures of the Beatles to the wall by her bed. (But, inconsistent with ten, she was smart enough to tape each picture to a piece of cardboard first then tack them up because our basement walls were never completely dry.)

“Kiss your hippy boyfriends night-night yet?”

“Har-har-dee har har, Sar-duh.”

We used to have a kiddie record player that Tess had received for Christmas a couple years before. It was actually pretty good for 45’s by silly bubblegum acts such as the Ohio Express, Archies and 1910 Fruitgum Company–but was plain dumb-looking with a serious piece of music on it. Plus the needle had dulled to the sharpness of a carrot stick and the speaker was not much better than that of a clock radio.

We hid the system we’d claimed in the closet until every last scrap Mrs. Roebecker later left in the hall after cleaning out the room had mysteriously vanished. I once saw a time lapse film of what happens to a dead whale on the ocean floor and recalled the Moonlight Moving Company. I noticed that the coffee pot, flashlight and cutlery never saw the hall. I also noticed that the end table I had scooped the change off of debuted in our front room soon after; Mom knew a thing or two about the Moonlight Movers herself. Tess also visited the third floor and brought back the guitar I’d seen earlier.

“You forgot something,” she said.

“I didn’t,” I said. “It’s busted. That’s why nobody wants it.”

“No, it’s not. Just needs strings and a little help with the pegs, that’s all. I’m gonna fix it up and you are going to learn how to play it.”

There was something dreampurple in that statement that didn’t get me to agree, but almost as magically prevented me from getting too bitchy about it. “Sure,” I said. “Then I’ll get a job with Loretta Lynn. Then Hee Haw.”

As it had been evident in her work at Fort O, Tess had a good dose of mechanical intelligence along with her artistic genius. Although what she eventually did with the guitar was a triumph, Tess was almost as impressive in her ability to quickly set up the “Realistic” brand stereo. It worked, well, sort of, but was coated with greasy dust and was rapidly declining the way inexpensive electronics will when neglected. She cleaned it and connived an effective antenna for the radio; she also eliminated a weird buzzing noise from one of the speakers and removed the dials and used a paper clip to clean the gunk that prevented them from working smoothly. The turntable was a mess, and if it had been up to me, it would have been tossed. But Tess took it apart as far as it allowed itself to be taken down and the reassembled device and the damned thing worked as it should–though she could do nothing about the needle other than replace it.

And we’d listen to the radio at night as we lay in bed. Mostly it would be KJR the Top 40 station, but on Friday and Saturday nights we tuned in The Weird Radio on FM. “Calbert of the Night” would play songs that KJR never would. Stuff like “Taxi” by Harry Chapin, early Bowie cuts, Leonard Cohen, and entire sides of albums by people I’d never heard of. Something wonderful was born inside me then. Nostalgia can be a form of spiritual cancer, but I’d certainly give anything I have to hear the music the way I did then. It was then that I understood the world was a big place and contained infinite possibilities, another view somewhat corroded by time.

Mom never said shit about the stereo system or the guitar or anything about the conspicuous amounts of candy or oddball shit we had lifted from stores. There were plenty of things she might have said shit about that got no further than the arch of her brow or a dark gaze. She wasn’t a dummy, of course she knew–probably figured she’d have done the same herself. I sometimes wondered if things might have turned out differently if we had the sort of mother who’d routinely turn our room out like a prison guard while we were in school. But I stopped wondering about it long ago. Some things are hardwired in us to the extent that they must play out a certain way.

Call it destiny.

(Part Seven on Monday. Tomorrow the Drifter will come in from the road and tell you things you ought to know–LA)