Amp'd (3 page)

I stare at my own face in the mirror, still boyishly handsome enough for Michelle, with haunted eyes that tell me not to go back out there to face Dad and his hopes for my future, or the other diners and their discomfort, or Michelle's bottomless pot of heart-palpitating cheeriness. And then the bathroom window offers the solution to all my problems.

 

JOBS YOU CAN'T HOLD WITH ONE ARM

Baseball player

Umpire

Croupier

Police officer

Fireman

Bartender

Roofer

Surgeon

Skycap

Bellhop

Boxer

Cowboy

Goalie

Crane operator

Alligator wrangler

Orchestra conductor

Courtroom stenographer

Airport landing signal officer

EMT

Astronaut

Plate spinner

And of course, Paperhanger

Sure, someone will feel compelled to point out a guy who, against all odds, held one of these jobs, maybe still does. Like Jim Abbott, born without his lower right arm, who somehow managed to pitch for the Yankees, Angels, White Sox, and Mariners (all American League teams, so he wouldn't have to bat). As if that invalidates the point. Exception does not disprove the rule, and the rule is, guys with one arm don't have these jobs. And if you needed any of these jobs done and a guy with one arm showed up, you'd demand a guy with both. (I know I would.)

 

SCHOOLED

I'd escaped through the Four Corners bathroom window before, back during a time when I still believed I didn't have to do things I didn't want to do, and what I didn't want to do then was finish an awkward lunch date with my teenaged chum Joel and two girls whose names I can't remember. Not only was Joel stuck paying the check, but he had to suffer the stereo diatribe of the girls on a long, shameful walk home. It took an inordinate time for me to properly assess my escape as an unforgivably cruel act.

This time the struggle with one less limb was greater and my good arm is dotted with splinters from the rotted window frame, my karma having traveled a quarter century to get here. Drifting down the narrow boulevard of our town's best attempt at a “Main Street,” my options for hiding out are few: too early for the bar, the Loading Zone being closed; daunted by the two hands required for page thumbing at the bookstore; and loitering in the bank is likely to call the undue attention I'm trying to avoid.

A beautiful woman at the bus stop scans her phone, and I want to approach and talk to her or pull up in my car and offer her a ride, only to head to the lake instead where we'll laugh and enjoy each other's company and maybe even have sex, in the car or by the lake, it won't matter. Instead I can't help but wonder if I'll do any of those things again—meet a beautiful woman, drive a car, swim in a lake, laugh in the company of another, or have sex, in a car or by the lake or any place on Earth. It would take a very special woman to overlook my shortcoming—perhaps a blind one, but even then the charade would be difficult to keep up for long, and would probably end with screams.

My best option for losing myself seems to be the used vinyl store, Broken Records, which offers to recommend it “open for business” status and rows of record albums that flip easily with one hand. The proprietor is older than I might have imagined if I'd bothered imagining him at all—less Jack Black in
High Fidelity
than Jack Palance in
City Slickers
.

“Just gonna look around a little,” I announce before he can ask, “Can I help you?” and I'm forced to respond, “I could use a hand.”

I start flipping through the
A
s and figure by the time I make my stoned way past ZZ Top, that should kill the best part of the day. “Show Tunes” should take care of the rest. I barely make it to ABBA when he insists on engaging me.

“You went to Paris Middle School.”

“I did,” I admit, before jabbing back at his age. “Were we in the same class?”

“I taught math. Or in your case, tried to.”

It's Mr. Madnick, my eighth-grade math teacher. I needled him for nine months, September through June, like a gassy, unwanted pregnancy, birthed and then handed over for adoption to the oblivion of summer, never to be seen again until now.
Of all the record stores in all the towns in all the worlds,
he must be thinking,
he walks into mine.

“Math was an abstract concept I couldn't grasp,” I explain. “And with fewer fingers to count on, I've only gotten worse at both math and grasping. Also, air guitar.”

“It had nothing to do with concepts. You didn't want to do the work.”

“Maybe I just needed it in simpler terms: ‘Aaron leaves town, heading west, at fifty-five miles an hour. When he intersects twenty-five years later with an SUV, traveling east, how many limbs will be subtracted from Aaron?'”

“That's recent, then? Surely you can't be whining about something that happened a long time ago.”

I slam the stack of
A
s upright and stare at him.

“Respect the vinyl,” he says, instantly rendering records as uncool as textbooks. “So, Aaron. What do you do now?”

“I'm a teacher,” I say, and I can't help laughing, but it's no match for his.

“God, you want to talk abstract concepts? I love that the universe does shit like that!” He steps down from behind the counter, and his transformation to actual human is complete enough to make me feel guilty about the terrorist snark that only a fourteen-year-old boy is capable of wreaking upon a teacher.

“And my eighth-grade math teacher retired and opened a cool record store.”

“Actually, I had sex with one of my students and got fired. Did a little time! You'd be surprised how really bad shit can turn out good for you.”

“Right. People keep telling me that.”

“Oh. Your arm,” he realizes. “No, I wasn't thinking that. That's completely fucked. I can't think of one good thing that might come from that.”

I'm not sure if he's serious or if this is some residual teacher mind trick meant to inspire me to prove him wrong, but even my currently stoned self isn't buying it.

“So, do you own a phonograph, or are you just browsing?”

“My father still has the stackable components that were so popular in the late eighties.” It makes me wish that of all the things Dad has squirreled away, he'd have kept the younger, whole version of me.

“Just one of many things wrong with the eighties. Ease over virtue. A good stereo system is comprised of the best pieces. That might mean a Fisher tuner, Marantz amplifier, JBL speakers, Technics turntable. And of course the cartridge, and even the stylus matters. But that's too much trouble, so you buy the single-manufacturer stackable set in the prefab unit with the Plexiglas window to display your mediocrity.”

“Or, I just play my iPod through my clock radio dock.”

“It's a slow, downward spiral,” he laughs. “No way to treat our best memories.” He pulls The Allman Brothers from their place among the
A
s and gazes at it as if it were a mirror reflecting his younger face. “Our favorite versions of ourselves are tied to music. ‘Whipping Post.' ‘Ramble On.' ‘Layla.'”

“‘It's a Long Way to Tipperary.'”

“I get it, I'm old! All right, in your case”—he assesses me—“some nineties grunge crap? Hootie? Or are you more of a residual eighties guy?”

“At least you didn't say ‘Achy Breaky Heart.'”

“Music can be transporting…” He slides to the
B
s and riffles through the albums, a flip-deck animation of music eras from Basie to Butthole Surfers. “But they lose that power through familiarity. Now, when I hear Bowie sing ‘Changes,' it's impossible to go back to the time I first heard it, because it's been painted over by all the times I've heard it since. It has no temporal resonance anymore. But ‘Eight Line Poem'? ‘Quicksand'? I've heard them infrequently enough over the years that I've got half a chance of
tasting
a moment from 1971.”

He crosses to the facing stack of
M
s, practiced fingers dancing across record jacket edges, and randomly pulls Morrissey's
Viva Hate
. He looks at it and me, assessing, believing he got it right.

“I could play ‘Everyday Is Like Sunday' or ‘Suedehead,' and you'd dig hearing it again.” He walks it over to the turntable. “But can it make you feel fifteen all over again? Nope. But this…”

(The initial thud and scratchiness of the needle is nearly enough to take me back.)

“Half a chance.”

He guesses right: I probably haven't heard “Little Man, What Now?” since the year it was released, and with its opening drumbeat I can summon up everything about it and who I once was. Thirteen, I guess, with the billion great and infinitesimal shifts ahead that make a life but an adolescent's sense of permanence—that I'd always be some version of
this
: likeable enough to have a crop of friends but still falling short of “popular,” good-looking enough to attract girls who only made me feel clumsy around them. Essentially, this brain, these thoughts … this
me
that would always love comic books and Nintendo and toaster pizza, housed in a fuller, elongated body better suited to adulthood. And with two arms.

I can't help but think about my three years of middle school, and the three years of high school that followed, years that felt like a lifetime. So why have the last three years been a blur? And why does it feel like the next three might already have happened before I can finish this thought?

What became of you,
indeed.

A scant 1:49 later, memory gives way to currency: I'm stoned and tired from standing so long, both hungry and nauseous, the ringing in my ears has returned, and the place where my arm used to be hurts. In the millions of grooves on the thousands of records neatly stacked in hundreds of rows, there may be dozens of songs similarly capable of triggering more sense-memory … but none that could possibly make me better.

I say good-bye to Mr. Madnick and thank him for not flunking me those years ago. Teetering outside, I see Fred Weber waiting outside the Four Corners with Dad, concern etched on his face, and I realize I now have another unforgivably cruel window escape to atone for.

 

DAD

Dad was a time traveler.

Because we lived near the boundary between time zones, Dad went back and forth
in time
every day on his way to work. He had to get up at 5:00
A.M.
to leave the house by 6:00 for the one-hour drive to work that, because it crossed from central time (here in Edgar County) into eastern time (there in Terre Haute), hurled him an hour into the future. He arrived at work at 8:00 so he could leave early enough to be home at 4:00
P.M.
—
exactly the same time he had left work
—when Jackie and I returned from school. All this in the futuristic-sounding Lincoln Mark IV, in silver “moondust” metallic paint with matching silver leather interior and silver-grained vinyl roof, a V8 engine capable of escape velocity, and opera windows through which the present hurtled into the past.

It seemed to me at the time that all that time jumping took its toll on Dad. To my young eyes he appeared older than most of my friends' fathers, who didn't have to battle the time continuum twice daily. In a decade of excess seemingly engineered for subsequent embarrassment, they sported Florida-shaped sideburns and wide lapels while Dad preferred three-piece suits and an astronaut's haircut generously flecked with white. Mom seemed to appreciate neither the grounding of Dad's common sense nor the boldness of his time traveling. (It wasn't always apparent what Mom wanted, and it remains unclear today.)

Before he was a time traveler Dad was an athlete, a cross-country skier who had even made the U.S. biathlon team. To the untrained eye, biathlon might seem a pointless mix of cross-country skiing and target shooting. In fact, the sport is not without purpose, the challenge being to test an athlete's ability to go from heart-pumping activity to the completely restful state needed to hit a target. The lesson Dad took from this seemed to be to live his life the opposite way—modulating everything away from the poles toward the center: neither heart-pounding exhilaration nor peaceful focus would be his purview. Wherever possible, Dad avoided transcendent highs as much as debilitating lows, preferring instead to live in that dull middle where nothing was terrible, nor would it ever be great. He shunned conflict, which might have resolved some things but instead avoided shouting; he stopped reaching for big, uplifting moments rather than risk failure and disappointment, or even the letdown of the quiet moments that lurk between the triumphant ones.

But back in 1964, before he had chosen the wide stripe of the middle, Dad traveled as a member of the U.S. biathlon team to the Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, where he finished forty-seventh. (Even the best American biathlete has never finished higher than eighth at the Olympics. Apparently we're built, like a muscle car, for power and speed, not emotional complexity.) Whenever I'd asked about Innsbruck Dad never talked about his own experience but about his roommate, Tommy Baker, the highest-scoring American, who finished sixteenth. According to Dad, Tommy also fucked a Russian figure skater, an East German luger, and all three women's downhill medalists from Austria. Those are perhaps odd details to share with a child, but the larger lesson didn't escape me that Tommy excelled at both physical endurance and hitting his targets.