Free Love and Death on Long Island by Gilbert Adair

faint-hearted sidling about the object of my desire, was past; the time to take action,to assert my liberty, had arrived. I got up at once from my desk, slipped on my overcoat and stepped into the street.
    God, usually of the Realist School, does on occasion dabble in the abstract. The morning sky was dappled all over with tiny puffy cloudlets, clean and white and arrayed above my head in a disposition of such foursquare regularity it might almost have been made by a waffle machine; yet there was also an undercurrent of closeness to the air, as stifling as a heavy scent, that made me perspire under my coat. I walked so briskly that in a matter of just five or six minutes I had arrived at the newsagent’s shop I was seeking.
    Once inside it, however, I was dismayed by what at first seemed to me the hopelessness of the expedition. Not that the newsagent did not stock film magazines. On the contrary, there were shelvesful of them, mostly of a populist, gossip-mongering variety but with two or three containing learned (to all appearances, learned) articles on Russian, Spanish and Japanese film-makers of whom, naturally, I had never heard. I pulled them, one after the other, down from their shelves, rifled through them more and more cursorily and replaced them any old how.
    But fortune, as would often be the case, was on my side. For as I prepared to leave empty-handed, I noticed a little further off, in another section of the shelving altogether, where not much more than its spine was exposed, an American magazine (a miniature dollar sign was just visible in the top left-hand corner), on whose cover, or that fragment of it accessible to the eye, was a photograph, of no more than postage-stamp dimension, a photograph of Ronnie Bostock.
    Stealthily, lest someone, who could only be a fellow browser, were to observe what I was about (very afraid I was of appearing ridiculous), I eased the magazine off the shelf. It was called
Teen Dream
and Ronnie Bostock’s photograph was just one, and among the less prominently displayed, of several portrait photographs on its front cover. These, superimposed on a constellation of gaudily coloured stars, all of different sizes, all radiating out from the centre, were (so I surmised) of the popular young film actors of the day, actors with such names as Kirk and Shane and Ralph and Jordan and even, unless I had somehow misread the meaning, River. Under each of them, moreover, was a caption bristling with exclamation marks and no doubt intended to entice the casual reader into the magazine. ‘Why Kirk Says “I’ll Never Make An R-Rated Movie”!!!’ and ‘Ralph’s Storybook Romance!!!’ and ‘Could You Be The Girl Jordan Will Fall For???’ And, under Ronnie’s photograph, to which my eyes immediately darted, ‘20 Facts Ya Didn’t Know About Him!!’. As someone who did not know any facts at all about him as yet, I confess I felt a certain onset of excitement, galled as I was at the same time by the one already manifest fact that my own favourite had had to make do with only two instead of the regulation three exclamation marks.
    I opened the magazine. Its first page was devoted to a Message from the Editor, evidently a regular monthly feature. ‘Hi, there!’ this began. ‘Summer’s ended (a-a-a-a-aw!) but the fall’s here (yay!) and the time is right’n’ripe for some cozy fireside r’n’r – which means rest’n’relaxation or rock’n’roll, dependin’ on your mood!! All your favorites have been in a great moodsince we last got together – and I’ve been in touch – I mean
personal
touch – with each’n’every one!!! Well now, just for starters – ‘My eyes glazed over. Were I to have to read one more word of such twaddle, I felt, I could not be accountable for my sanity. I turned the page. There, among the table of contents, was what I was looking