These rather clueless attempts to be a good boy do not preclude a certain flirtation with cool. Where does it come from, this sudden attraction to style, an intimation—covert at first, carefully hidden—that the stylish might have something to do with me, might be something I could partake of? My school bus ride is tolerable only because the loudspeakers on the school bus play a good radio station, and I can tune out the evil Roger and Mike with the music of the Rolling Stones; I can’t stop singing “Ruby Tuesday,” from Between the Buttons, an album on whose cover the band’s faces melt in stylish distortion. I—like? am attracted to?—a boy named Tom Hutch, a smart and likable kid with a beefy body and blond hair crew-cut and waxed into angularity; Tom’s older brother lives in Los Angeles, and he sends back items which have about them the unmistakable flavor of the new: a photographic self-portrait in a polka-dot shirt with a long, pointy collar, looking thoughtful in a bathroom mirror. He lives in an apartment in the city, Tom says, alone. Strange possibility, I think, unimaginable. He sends a poster from a concert, its unfamiliar lettering oddly organic, as if it’s in motion. He sends an album of peculiar music by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and Tom and I pay close attention to its distortions and funny lyrics: Suzy Creamcheese, what’s got into you? We know we’re supposed to like it, and we do.

Tom and I go to a concert at Antelope Valley Community College. I’ve never been to a rock concert before, and I don’t know what to expect; I go because there’s a pop song on the radio I like called “Yellow Balloon,” and the band who sings it is opening the concert, warming up for the main act, a band I’ve never heard of called the Byrds. When my father drops us off, everyone’s very excited about the Byrds, and soon we’re part of a crush of people in the lobby of the concert hall, which the Byrds, who are late, must pass through when they arrive. Mounting heat, then a wave of apprehension: here they are, pale and long-haired, in lush tapestry shirts and leather hats. I’ve never seen people like them; they have an aura of otherness about them, the future’s unfamiliar ozone. My Yellow Balloon–men seem flimsy beside them, cheerful little bits of fluff; the Byrds play with a sort of urgent whiny insistence, the light show (another thing I’ve never seen before) throbbing and pulsing behind them, a dilating wheel of colored light filled with kaleidoscopic pulses: jellyfish, mandalas, explosions of stars. They sing “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Eight Miles High”; they sing like they mean it.