The Big Bang

Venus begins to orbit Keith Ashman, and suddenly the evening enters another dimension.

For an hour, the long-haired, chain-smoking Englishman has been scribbling notes and carrying on a conversation in a dingy booth at the downtown bar Benders. Except for the loud music that makes it necessary to shout and the beer sloshing out of glasses on the unsteady table, you'd swear Ashman was leading a discussion not at midnight in a rock club but in a university seminar or the hushed halls of a science institute.

Galactic evolution. Stellar chemistry. Star-cluster collisions. The expansion rate of the universe. The fate of everything.

For a guy who looks so much at home in a grungy dive bar, Ashman is surprisingly clued in to the secrets of the cosmos.

But then comes his close encounter with perpetual motion personified, Venus Starr, the guitarist for the three-chord punk band the Stretchmarxxx, and Ashman's nature shifts.

He revels in her attention as Venus wraps her arms around his neck. Her hair, only slightly blacker and more unkempt than Ashman's, stirs the smoke from Ashman's Marlboro Light.

Then he ducks her gravitational pull to join his mates on a stage that's literally just a plywood deck laid on a pool table. Ashman shoulders his bass, and the Lawrence-based band he plays in, the Hefners, fires up a set of 1960s-inspired speed rock. In the darkest corner of the small stage, Ashman appears to relax.

"We know the fate of the universe," he had shouted earlier, not because he was excited but because he was yelling over the bone-jarring noise of another band. "It has theological implications, social implications. People don't seem to get it."

People don't always get Ashman, either -- not all of him, anyway.

Some, like Venus, worship his bass chops, his appealing accent and his eternal search for a good time. "We ended up at his house one night, me and Camille [Hendren, bass player for the Stretchmarxxx] did," Venus says. "There was a little shindig, if you will." One bartender at the Replay Lounge in Lawrence calls Ashman her "cleverest lush."

But that's just one Ashman. The other can tell you that in the distant reaches of the universe, there are double-sun systems called binary stars spiraling into oblivion -- one a red giant, the other a superhot but small and dense white dwarf.

Because of its density, the white dwarf is sucking material away from its huge partner. It will keep doing so until both stars explode, propelling light and heat out into space. Called a supernova, this stellar disaster briefly outshines whole galaxies. Just in the last few years, observations of these catastrophes have answered some of mankind's longest-held questions about the expansion and future of the universe.

Exploding binary stars have told us, finally, whether the world will end in fire or ice.

But it baffles Ashman that people don't seem to care.

Perhaps that's part of the reason the one-man astrophysics department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, a man responsible for some of his field's most original research in the past decade, struggles with his own dual nature. Scientist and university professor. Anti-authoritarian product of London's working class and, at heart, overgrown punk rocker. Sufferer of bipolar disorder, which motivates him to drive fast and drink hard one week and hide under his covers the next. Popular teacher. Dedicated musician.

He may, in fact, be the closest human equivalent of a binary star.

Keith. James. Larry. Bryce. The guys in the Hefners would love for their fans to think they're the lost love children of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, and they joke about one day filing the first-ever class-action paternity suit. But they're actually the sons of different fathers (and mothers). Besides Ashman, who took over the bass only last summer, there's Larry Brinkman on guitar, James Fowler on drums and Bryce Billings on keyboards.

Brinkman started the band in 1996 after a stint on a pirate radio station, KAW 88.9, playing 1960s rock records. His new band had a psychedelic '60s sound with a punk flair and Brinkman's garbled lyrics over the top. It was cool enough to score the group a European tour after only its third show. A German label, Middle Class Pig, headed by University of Kansas grad Erik Bauer, signed the Hefners to a deal that produced three albums.

Between European tours and gigs in Lawrence, the band began an obsession with the board game Trouble (with the Popomatic die-rolling bubble), which became a favorite downtime distraction. The group embellished the board game with drinking game-like rules. "You always had two winners," Brinkman says. "Somebody was way more stoned than anybody else."

Brinkman doesn't remember meeting Ashman. "Lawrence isn't really like that," he says. "[People] just kind of slowly make themselves known."

But Ashman had fallen for the Hefners, and he put out the word that if their bassist ever died, he wanted in. His offer came at the right time. The Hefners, Brinkman says, were ready to part ways with their bassist. Ashman, meanwhile, was playing with a couple of Brinkman's friends, who pronounced him "badass," perhaps not realizing that their endorsement would lose them their own bassist. For his part, Ashman felt that his former bandmates didn't really want to leave the garage.