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O’s face
Lights up when she sees them
Big smile. “Hi, guys!”
Hi.
Hi.
“How are you?” Ben asks, feeling stupid.
“You know, I’m okay,” O says. “It’s a slacker girl’s fantasy—I’m actually forced at gunpoint to lie around my room and do nothing but watch bad TV.”
“It won’t be for much longer.”
“No?”
“No.”
“How are you guys?”
“Yeah, good,” Chon says.
“Ben, you good?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Ben says.
The session is cut off.
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Yeah, Ben’s fine.
205
“Did you notice the background on the Skype?” Ben asks Chon. “It’s a different place.”
He’s watched it about thirty times.
“And listen …”
He jacks the volume up. “What’s that in the background?”
“Voices.”
“Speaking …”
“English.”
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Danny Benoit is a deacon in the Church of the Lighter Day Saints.
And a highly paid sound technician who makes the 405 run from his home in Laguna Canyon up to the L.A. recording studios about once a month in a ’66 Vette he calls the Pirate Ship.
“I sail it up to L.A. once a month,” Danny says, “fill it full of loot, and sail it back before I get caught.”
Danny B is gold.
Or platinum.
DB can make an average voice great and a great voice sublime. “The biggest names in the recording industry” all want Danny on the mixer.
He could give a shit who they are.
He ain’t interested in dropping names
Rubbing elbows
Hanging out
He just wants to do his mix, make his money, and come home.
And Danny does some of his best work for Ben & Chonny’s.
They’ve been known to give him mixes depending on what “artist” he’s sweetening at the moment. He wants
Ben likes hearing tunes on the radio and knowing he contributed.
“They should put your names on the CDs,” Danny said once. In fact, he was going to thank them at the Grammys one night but fortunately thought better of it.
It would have been cool, but, uncool.
They take a recording of the Skype session to him at his house. Danny looks like your basic hippie who knows that the seventies are way over but doesn’t care. T-shirt, jeans, sandals, ponytail.
It’s rude to come to someone’s house empty-handed so they bring him a bag of Moon Landing. (“Some say it happened, some say it was staged, we say who gives a fuck.”) Danny has immaculate stoner manners and offers it around.
Formalities over, Ben asks, “Can you enhance this?”
“Can Kobe drain a three?”
He puts it on his home system, dials some dials, switches some switches back and forth, and in a minute you might as well have been in the room with O. And the English speakers in the background?
“Radio,” Danny pronounces. “FM.”
“American station?”
Danny has a very fine ear. He knows his stations from frequent listening to find out who’s ripping him on royalties. (The answer, of course, is that everyone is—it’s that kind of business. Drugs, movies, music—all a circle- jerk of larceny.) He can listen to empty air and know which station it is.
“KROC,” he says after listening to it a few times. “ ‘The Kroc on your dial.’ Out of L.A. Enchilada plate of current pop hits and nineties music.”
“O listens to it,” Chon says.
“Can it reach Mexico?”
“It can,” Danny says, “but not with this clarity. This signal is beautiful.”
Yes it is, Ben thinks.
207
Back to the file, back to research.
If they have O in Southern California, where?
It takes a lot of digging, but they hit on it.
Dennis has “concerns” about a company called Gold Coast Realty, based in … wait for it …
Laguna Beach, CA.
“Gold Coast Realty,” Ben says. “Ring a bell?”
“Didn’t you buy
“Yeh.”
“Steve Ciprian.”
Steve Ciprian, owner of Gold Coast.
Charter member of the Church of the Lighter Day Saints.
Aka Stepdad Six.
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