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This is where the music begins. It is so simple. It is at the end of the 1960s, on Coney Island in New York. There is a beach and boardwalk, a small amusement park, some restaurants, fun slot machines, and so on.
There are a lot of people here. She does not stick out from the crowd. She is young, fifteen-sixteen, dressed in a thin, light colored dress. Her hair is blonde and a bit limp, and she has not washed it in a few days. She comes from San Francisco and, before that, from somewhere else. She has all of her belongings in a bag she wears over her arm. A shoulder bag, it is blue and has “Pan Am” on it.
She walks around a bit listlessly, talks to someone here and there, answers when she is spoken to, looks a little bit like a hippie girl, but that is not what she is. She is not anything, actually. She travels around. Lives from hand to mouth. Meets people.
Do you need a place to crash?
There is always someone who asks.
And you can still live like that, even during those times.
She has a few dollars in her hand, ones she has just gotten from someone. She asked for them, she is hungry, she wants food. Really she is just hungry, nothing more. But she is happy otherwise, it is such a beautiful day here, outside the city. The sky is endless, and the world is large.
She sees a few kids who are pretending to sing in front of a machine where you can record your own song. They can still be found here and there even during those times, and exactly at places like these: “Record your own song and give it away to someone. Your wife, your husband, a friend. Or just keep it for yourself.”
Like a small silly momento.
She steps into the machine just for fun and randomly starts feeding coins into it.
You can select background music, but she does not. She pushes record and then she sings.
Look mom, they’ve destroyed my song.
It does not sound very good. It really does not. But it does not mean anything.
Look, mom, what they’ve done to my song.
The words do not fit very well with reality. It is such a beautiful day out there.
And when she has finished singing she waits for the record and gets it.
And then she suddenly remembers that she is supposed to meet someone here.
She is in a hurry to get to the designated place, it is a park.
She is going to meet a relative. A distant one. Not the relative, but the distance to the place where the relative lives. It is a place on the other side of the earth.
That was the girl, Eddie de Wire. The American girl who was found drowned in Bule Marsh, The District, a few years later. A place on the other side of the earth.
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