On the day that my mother almost committed bigamy, the body of a man wearing a wedding dress washed up on the beach.

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As the trucks with their four-wheel drive sped along the wide open beach, an ambulance and a police car began to give chase behind us and, looking up, I saw a police helicopter whirring overheard.  The surfers I was with pulled over allowing the ambulance to overtake us and we followed at a discreet distance, everyone standing up in the back of the truck and craning their necks to see what was going on.

Farther up the beach appeared to be floodlit.  At least a dozen vehicles had beaten us to it and crowds had already gathered at the water's edge.   There was a body lying face down on the sand illuminated by the headlamps of parked trucks.   A familiar feeling of panic began to creep over me and my first instinct was to ask Rufus to take me home, but when everybody else got out and I found myself alone, I followed.  I was drawn by a morbid fascination and, feeling sick with dread, I jostled with the crowds to get a closer look.

It was so weird that at first I thought I was hallucinating.  The body had clearly been pulled from the water and I thought it must have somehow come to be wrapped in the tulle that the storm had whipped from our bamboo arch.  Then, as the ambulance men lifted it onto a gurney, the head rolled toward us and I could see it was a man's face.  Bloated and mottled and strewn with seaweed, but definitely a man's.
   
But he wasn't wrapped in something, he was wearing it.

It was sodden and crumpled and it clung to his body like the spoiled plumage of a magnificent bird washed up on the beach, but there was no mistaking it for anything but a wedding dress.

"Man!" said Rufus, "The press are going to be all over this one."

"Don't get too many men in wedding dresses washed up in your beach, I suppose?"

I was being flippant to cover my nerves.  That was a dead man lying there and without being aware of it, I had raised my hands to my face in horror. "You don't get it," Rufus looked at me.  "As far as the press are concerned, this isn't just any man.   Someone just told me. It's the son of that British rock 'n roll guy--Shotgun Marriott."

My knees gave way and I flopped down onto the sand before Rufus could catch me.  There was another reason besides my mother's ceremony that had brought me to New York.

I was here to interview for the job of ghostwriting Shotgun Marriott's autobiography.

I knew I had to tell Shotgun Marriott's story for a very simple reason.  He interested me.  I wanted to know how he had managed not to become just another aging rocker, desperately trying to hang onto his glory years ... I wanted to know what had really happened that night years ago when a groupie had been found dead in his bedroom.