Belinda Melbourne from the second book turns up again with the first line of the chapter, asking Rennie if she’s heard what happened to Sunny Silver and Cory Rivkin. We’ve also met Sunny Silver before in the first book—she’s known as Female Jimi Hendrix in these posts—but Cory Rivkin is someone who’s yet to be introduced, as is whatever’s happened to them. Along with some description of the “convoy” from the motels, we get some more name-dropping, including Marishka Erzog, who’s just gained a last name and separated “amicably” from Stan Hirsh, the guy who has Rennie’s old job. Why are all breakups in the Rennie Stride Universe amicable? That doesn’t make for compelling conflict.
Rennie tells her no and feels a blast of fear before going into a combination name-drop/recap of previous book action. So Cory Rivkin is a musician (naturally), “the drummer for Owl Tuesday, a solid second-rank L.A. band to whom Rennie had given a few bits of good press in days gone by.” That leads into Rennie shitting on Rose Red Herring one more time. Rose Red Herring, also known as Rose Noble, was Lionheart’s publicist until Rennie got Turk to fire her because Rennie is terrified of and paranoid about other women who are interested in Turk romantically/sexually. Rose’s interest is infantilized by being called “a big giant crush” and Kennealy-Morrison uses the beyond-stupid “Turk-crusher-onner.” This woman used to be a professional writer.
So Rennie decides she needs to stay away from Rose, so she’s not a complete moron. I just wonder if Rose is aware that Rennie got her fired. That would be interesting.
Belinda strings out the suspense for a while. It turns out Sunny almost got hit by an amp and broke her arm. And we find out “that little groupie” made Rennie a fringed leather sling after she got shot in the third book. What sad little self-loathing groupie was that? They should all know how much she despises them. She never gets a name and Rennie doesn’t even acknowledge this. Rennie pushes Belinda a little and gets a portentious look that lets her figure out that Cory’s bought the farm. Which he has.
Credit where credit is due: Kennealy-Morrison changed up her usual pattern with the murders. In the last four books, the murder was always at the end of the chapter and served as a form of cliffhanger to encourage the reader into the following chapter. The fact that it took five books for this to happen is somewhat less promising.
Belinda expands on what happened.
He was apparently out roaming around the festival, happy as a clam, picked up a cute little groupie—no one anyone knows, and she hasn’t been seen since,, in case you were wondering—
Then how do you know she’s a groupie at all, Belinda? Maybe she’s just a regular festivalgoer who decided she wanted to experience some groovy hippie musician dick. Oh, yeah, I forgot; groupie is Rennie/the writer’s chosen term of abuse for women who aren’t Queen Emma Peel and have sex with musicians.
–and he was sitting in the pavilion alternately talking to some people from his label and making out with the chick when all of a sudden he fell over dead.”
Mary Prax suddenly manifests herself in the story with an expression of disbelief before Belinda is allowed to continue Basil Exposition Dumping.
The medical people at the festival who examined Cory after his death said he hadn’t overdosed but don’t rule out any number of other things. His body’s been taken to the county morgue for an autopsy, but “they” (I guess Belinda means the festival organizers) are “keeping it quiet,” as she says, for fear of fan reaction. To some guy dropping dead of a heart attack? I doubt it, but I’m sure the reason for the semi-cover-up will become clear later on.
Belinda wonders if it’s “an omen” and that makes Rennie think of Lexicographer, which she brushes off as now the other woman “had an (sic) slightly overinflated sense of her own abilities as it was.” At least Rennie’s gone back to sniping at women she’s friendly with in her own mind. I think she slacked off on that in the last book. Rennie doesn’t want to think it’s a murder yet and they go to the performer’s pavilion.
Again we get Rennie flexing over scoring a performer pass, and find out that this is a means for her of getting one up on Niles Clay. I’ve decided that since Clay rhymes with Ray, this is the writer’s Ray Manzarek analogue. And we get a brief foray into third person omniscient POV when Kennealy-Morrison decides to give us more detail about Niles’s feelings on Rennie’s one-upping him somehow.
Rennie wonders aloud whether someone tried to kill Female Jimi Hendrix and Belinda doesn’t know, while assuring her that she doesn’t know any more about what happened to Cory than she’s detailed and calling her Strider.
The performer’s pavilion gets a couple of paragraphs of description and everyone except Rennie goes after food. Our protagonist takes a glass of champagne, specifically Moet et Chandon, from Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, a member of the Grateful Dead. Then we get a paragraph or two about how the band likes to spike people’s drinks with LSD and how some of their roadies have spiked a punch bowl in the pavilion. And then we get yet more evidence that Rennie Stride is a walking Cluster B disorder.
Rennie watched Daily Pillar (sic) columnist Alvy Larrable, one of her least favorite people on the planet and forty years older than just about everybody there, gulp an enthusiastic mouthful before somebody leaned over and obviously warned him, for he instantly spat it out and flung the remainder angrily onto the ground.
With any luck, maybe he’d swallowed enough to start him tripping like a hobo riding the psychedelic rails, the septic creep; could be fun to watch, especially if he started hallucinating he was turning into a taxicab, or a potato chip.
Rennie needs to be in prison more than Danny Marron did. Note that we haven’t been told about anything Alvy Larrable (which I’m sure is an anagram) did to warrant being called a septic creep and he’s never appeared in the series before this. No, we’re just supposed to nod along with Rennie like brainwashed zombie worshippers, never questioning her. Fuck you, Rennie, you Mother of Nightmares.
It surprised me that she does go on to mention the first time she drugged people against their will, at the meeting of the Painted Ladies in the first book and admits she doesn’t have moral high ground about drugging people against their will. Then she proceeds to frame the entire incident as not her fault, you guys. No, it was because of her “vile mother-in-law Marjorie” (she isn’t vile at all) and the “stuck-up assemblage of San Francisco’s upper-crustiest dragonesses” (they weren’t, or if they were we got no specifics at all) and Rennie was mad about being forced to wear a Chanel suit (which was one of the pieces of her society-bride wardrobe that she kept, so she must not have minded it too much) and forced to attend the meeting, even though if she’d just acted like an adult and said no she wouldn’t have had to, but she’s a spoiled selfish arrogant child and can’t use her words. She tries to tell us the LSD was diluted but, interestingly, doesn’t say a word about that in Chapter 10 of the first book when she tells the story, so I’m calling retcon.
She justified taking the champagne with the assertion that she saw Pigpen open the bottle. According to his Wikipedia page, McKernan was into alcohol, not psychedelics, and there was a whole section in California Screamin’ when Rennie set up a meeting with Jerry Garcia and Pigpen and Becca Revels, who had taken too much acid and her mind was essentially gone. Pigpen was specifically mentioned in this section as being “disturbed” by this, so the idea that Pigpen would dope her isn’t supported by his past presentation in the series.
Word has gotten around in the pavilion about Cory Rivkin keeling over dead and Rennie does a bunch of projecting over her Murder Chick reputation and getting annoyed. Well, it is what she does best. We are also told that Ares Sakura (known in these posts as War God Cherry Blossom), Turk’s bodyguard in the third book, and Mary Prax are still together romantically. I guess Kennealy-Morrison got tired of sticking same-sex relationships for the bisexual Mary Prax in the spaces between books so she wouldn’t have to write them.
Diego Hidalgo (the Jim Morrison analogue) turns up, and Rennie alludes to wanting to set him up with someone and Mary Prax goes on a misogynist mean-girl rant about someone we haven’t heard of in this entire series, a woman named Portia Paradise who is involved with Diego. Three guesses as to who this is, even though Mary Prax calls her a “platinum-blonde bimbo we can’t stand” and calls Portia’s name “a nice traditional hooker name.” Isn’t it cute that she thinks she’s one of the good, non-Evil Blondes?
Then Rennie spiels out a story that seems like a mash-up of the first time she interviewed Jim Morrison and the first time she met Pamela Courson. As usual, Rennie proves herself a snobby, hateful asshole as she shames Portiapam as being stupid and both she and her lickspittle buddy “scream[] with laughter and pick[] themselves up off the ground.”
I really would like to know how Kennealy-Morrison thought this would make her female leads look sympathetic and relatable at all, rather than spiteful and immature.
And then we’re gifted with a page and a half about how Portiapam is stupid and using Diego and he only stays with her because it’s comfortable and it’s all straight out of Kennealy-Morrison’s memoir about why Jim never left Pam and does not make anyone involved in this narrative look good at all.
There’s more food talk, some musings on the use of profanity in songs/album covers in the late Sixties, Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane is name-checked, and a historically invalid female head of a record company presents herself: Dian Cazadora, the head of Sovereign Records. She’s blonde, so she’s evil, as witnessed when Rennie cuts herself trying to get a wine bottle open and Dian asks why she doesn’t get one of the guys to do it for her. Rennie doesn’t throw death threats, as is her wont, but here’s what she thought in regard to this question.
Well, up yours, bitch! But that kind of attitude’s only what I’d expect from someone who’s secretly bonking a Delta blues legend twice her age—and a married one at that…
Hey, slut-shaming! Where have you been? Long time no see!
Plus, this Delta blues guy is married? You mean like you are, Rennie? I don’t think you have any room to talk, seeing as every time you have sex with your fiancé you’re committing adultery. Pot, meet kettle.
The next few pages are mainly name-dropping and aggrandizement of Rennie, who managed to score an interview with a character that is obviously Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. Funny, I would have thought she’d have complete contempt for them because they aren’t hip enough to suit her, but he’s reclusive and only agreed to speak to her for an interview, so he recognized her essential specialness. Even so, she does snipe about her “nobly refraining from making him look like the complete wacko he so was.” Well, he was crazy to talk to you, so I’ll give you that one.
This whole digression about Bisk Hastings (that’s what the Brian Wilson analogue is called) is about a page and a half long and she just goes on and on about how crazy and fat he is. It’s really hypocritical, but that’s nothing new for her.
Anyway, Rennie’s all excited because she’s at the center of the action and she’s so ultraspecial and these are her people and she’s ready for things to get started. She has a passing thought about Possible Murder Victim Cory but ain’t got no time for that now.
And—chapter! I didn’t realize it at the time, but the fourth book didn’t have much in the way of internalized misogyny and slut-shaming because something had to give to make room for all the nobility-fellating. I would have enjoyed it more if I knew the vacation would come to an end in this book.
It strikes me how much more sympathetic the writer seemed to the festivalgoers in her memoir, but here I think her contempt for people she/Rennie see as beneath her is coming out. Look at how Turk describes the customers at the Red Apple Rest in the last chapter when the Gruesome Threesome enter the restaurant, “laden forks” and “slack, gaping mouths,” so we get an obesity shot and a stupidity shot in the same sentence. The exultant speech she has about the festivalgoers being “people like me” is a direct crib from the scene in the first book when she attends the concert at Longshoreman’s Hall in North Beach and finds the hippie scene, but has to be a cut above the people in that scene. It’s dialed up to eleven here because she’s in the running to be a duchess and her superiority is assured. I wonder how long it’s going to take her to start investigating whether Cory Rivkin was murdered. If the last two books are any indication, the killer(s) has at least a month.
Next time, chapter 7, wherein the wheel keeps on spinning, but Patricia Kennealy-Morrison enters the narrative even though she isn’t named, as do War God Cherry Blossom and the asshole Ned Raven of Bluesnroyals, along with the wife he stole from Ross Poldark.
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