Barry’s request caught me completely off guard, but it didn’t take much effort to talk my mother into it. Late that summer, things were still cordial between my mother and me. When I asked whether Barry could board with us, she held off saying yes until she could at least run the idea by my stepfather. With Hal spending so little time at the house, he could hardly have cared less. I wrote back to Barry with the go-ahead. He began packing, while his parents booked his flight.

If I hadn’t already gotten the job two weeks before school started, I probably would remember Barry’s arrival more clearly. His flight landed the Saturday before the first day of classes, and of course, that turned out to be a workday for me. My mother drove to the airport to pick him up, and by the time I got home from my shift, Barry was already unpacking. A couple of days beforehand, my mother had moved my grandmother into the larger guest room, giving Barry the bedroom directly across the hall from me.

With his family thousands of miles away, Barry felt cooped up at our house, and almost from the day he moved in, he began asking me to drive him around. This suited me just fine. I liked driving, but the things Barry wanted to do usually cost money.

Within a few weeks, Barry decided he needed a source of spending money beyond the allowance his mother sent him. He found a job working at the snack bar of the local drive-in theater. Somehow, that seemed just perfect for someone who loved movies as much as Barry did. With the two of us working, some weeks it seemed as though the only time I saw him was in school, at breakfast, or sitting in the passenger seat of my mother’s car.

I enjoyed driving over the pass, and I loved the chance to window shop at Topanga Plaza, a huge enclosed shopping mall. Barry usually didn’t have any more pocket money than I did, but he spent freely on things he wanted, while I was trying to save a little money to buy Christmas gifts. I might spend an hour looking through the titles at Pickwick Books, and never buy a thing. Barry, on the other hand, would walk right into Wallichs Music City and buy sheet music or new records.

Barry knew a lot about music. He was especially interested in Broadway musicals and their film adaptations, but he also listened to rock and roll. He had arrived from Taiwan with some of the strangest looking records I ever saw. The album covers looked just like those I saw in record stores, but the vinyl disks inside were semitransparent, and brightly colored.

“Why aren’t they black?” I asked.

“They’re bootleg,” Barry said. “In Taiwan, you can pick these up for a dollar apiece. I bought a lot of them over there.” He pulled one of the records from its sleeve, and held the aqua-colored disk up to the window. You could see right through it. He put the disk on my record player, and flipped the switch. It was the first time I had heard “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Our senior year was a particularly rich time for new American movies—“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” “Patton,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “M.A.S.H.” Barry wanted to see all of them. With only two movie screens in town, feature films were often slow in coming to Simi. Barry and I sometimes had to drive over the hill.

We drove into Hollywood with Robin Bonis to see a film adaptation of Jean Giraudoux’s “The Madwoman of Chaillot” after Mr. Enfield told our drama class he was considering the play as our spring production. In talking about this, several of our classmates had pointed out that this movie, being an art film, would likely never make it into wide release.

Several nights in late October, I drove Barry to Valley State College to see rehearsals for their stage production of “Galileo,” by Bertold Brecht. Our friend Terry Wolf had a small part in the cast, and when he wasn’t on stage, he sat around talking with us. It felt important having someone I knew in the cast of a college production, although Terry had only graduated from high school that previous spring.

Los Angeles that year was home to a number of noteworthy stage plays, and Barry recognized the unique opportunity this offered for the true theatre lover. He didn’t just want to read the reviews in the newspaper, he wanted to see these productions while they were here. A good movie would be around for years in re-runs, but a great stage performance was ephemeral, quite possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

In February, Barry and I drove to the Music Center, and stood in front of the Ahmanson Theatre box office to buy student rush tickets to see Maggie Smith starring in a production of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” directed by Sir Lawrence Olivier.

Having Barry in my home was like living with a musician, a film historian, and an authority on all things theatrical. I had long known about his interest in movies, but I hadn’t realized that he knew so much about music.

The old upright piano in our living room got very little use before Barry came to live with us. My stepfather had bought it as a Christmas gift for my mother the year after we moved to Simi. I think it reminded my mother of her childhood and the piano lessons she had taken all those years ago. She hadn’t touched a keyboard in decades, but could still read music…a little. For a few months, my mother would occasionally sit and pick her way through the old hymnal she kept in the piano bench. After the novelty wore off, the keys sat untouched…until Barry moved in. He often bought sheet music from various musicals he liked, and would sit by the hour accompanying himself at the keys.