Old Records Never Die (15 page)

But who cares? Memory isn't about reality, and neither is music. It's about the comforting reflections we want to hold on to, even if they're mostly bullshit. My bloody Replacements record doesn't actually represent me, just like Bob Dylan's
Blood on the Tracks
doesn't represent what happens when a marriage between two human beings falls apart. But it's so much more romantic and perfect than real life. What sort of asshole would you be if you pointed that out?

As the music played, I held the record up to my face, right up to my nose, and breathed in deep. I don't know what it smelled like. Not old pot resin. Definitely not what it smelled like when it first showed up in the mail, wrapped in brown kraft paper. It smelled like something new but also very old, something foreign but intimately familiar.

Nobody on this earth, no soul alive or dead, could tell me that wasn't my record. Maybe not the record I'd been looking for, but goddammit, I had found my record.

S
he looked confused at first. Unbelieving. Like the expression you might give to an ex-lover who showed up at your doorstep unannounced, just to tell you about the kid they forgot to mention a few decades ago was yours. Her mouth opened, but the words weren't coming. She gasped. Then giggled. Then gasped again. Her brain was trying to catch up with the clearly ridiculous information that was being delivered to it.

“Is that . . . ? It can't be . . . Are you kidding me?”

Heather G.—twenty-five years older than the last time I'd laid eyes on her—pulled the Bon Jovi record out of my hands like a purse snatcher. She held it close to her face, studying the numbers, tracing them with a finger.

“Jesus Christ, this is my phone number. It is!”

“No it's not,” I said, scoffing. I was pretty sure she was mistaken. How could she have recognized it so quickly? If you showed me a random series of digits and asked if it was my home phone number from 1987, I couldn't have told you with any certainty. But she seemed convinced.

“It's absolutely mine,” she insisted.

“It can't be!” I said.

“It totally is. I can't even believe you found this.”

She reached into her pocket, pulled out a pair of glasses. Granny glasses! Or at least the type of frames I once associated with grandmothers, with the delicate horn rims. She slid them onto her nose, and then pulled the record closer, giving the faded Sharpie on the sleeve a thorough inspection.

The woman for whom I once would have gladly crawled through a bed of hot coals and broken glass just to touch one of her inner thighs was sitting in front of me, older than our parents were when I first touched her breasts over a varsity cheerleader sweater, wearing granny glasses so she could read the fine print on a Bon Jovi record.

“Why didn't you call the number and find out?” she asked. “You should have called. You would have gotten my brother. He's got the number now.”

“Come on! Seriously?”

“I still had that number six years ago. When I moved into my parents' house, I just transferred the service over.” She laughed, maybe at me, maybe a little at herself. “Not a lot has changed since you've been gone.”

So it really was my record. I poured myself another glass of Michigan red wine. Because what the hell, if we were going to do this, let's do this.

Everything about this was surreal. Not just reuniting with my first girlfriend—the first person to ever do things to my body that I had previously only done to myself—but to be in this house, which seemed so familiar, even though I'd never set foot in it before today. It looked almost identical to the house where Heather lived when we were teenagers—which, weirdly, was located less than five miles away from where we were currently sitting.

South Chicago suburban houses all look the same to me. The architecture is the same, the floor plans are generally laid out the same, they even smell the same: a sort of bland potpourri. I think they soak the aluminum siding in it. I swear, I could wander through this neighborhood after dark, walk into any random door, and find my way around the house, in the pitch-black, without much problem at all.

The last time I was out here, in the suburbs of my youth, my brother and I went to visit our old house and spent almost an hour trying to find it. We knew the street, and generally where it should've been, but we couldn't decide how one lime-green house was all that different from another lime-green house two doors down. When we finally located it, I grabbed a fistful of grass from the front lawn and ripped it from the earth. I told my brother that I needed some token of our time there, something to remember that this used to be our home. He looked at me like I'd lost my goddamn mind.

I brought the grass home and put it inside a mason jar. I took it out the next day, to show to Kelly. We both agreed that the grass smelled almost exactly like a mall Cinnabon. I immediately flushed it down the toilet, and we never spoke of it again.

“Bon Jovi was my first concert,” Heather said, holding the record in both hands, like it was something heavy that might fall and break one of her toes. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“It was at the UIC Pavilion. Where they shot the video for ‘Wanted Dead or Alive.' Well, some of it. I think Cinderella was the opening act. I went with three friends, and we spent the whole time in the bathroom before the show, making our hair as big as possible. Because we were sure that Jon Bon Jovi would see us and call us onstage.”

“You were in the video?” I asked.

“Well, not that you could see my face. But yeah, I might be in there somewhere, in the crowd. Like a blur.”

I was speechless. How was I just hearing about this now? We had dated for, well, I don't know how many months, and we'd watched dozens if not hundreds of Bon Jovi videos together. We listened to this record over and over again. I pretended to sing along and enjoy “Wanted Dead or Alive” more times than I care to remember. And I watched the video with fake rapt attention. And not once had she offered up the tidbit, “You know, I was a little bit in this video.”

Maybe I had overplayed my fandom, and she feared that revealing her inclusion in Bon Jovi mythology, or Jov-ology, would make it messier to sever ties with me when the time came.

“Should we play it?” she asked, looking up at me expectantly. “Let's play it.”

The needle dropped, and her small, tastefully decorated Midwestern dining room was filled with the teenage-girl panty-soaking power chords of the Jov.

I leaned toward my micro recorder, perched between the plate of fancy stuffed olives and the rapidly disappearing bottle of wine, and whispered, “Let the record show that Heather is currently dancing to a Bon Jovi song I'm hearing for the first time.”

This was true. I absolutely didn't know what I was listening to. Whatever the first track on side two is called. Where Jovi rhymes “you're under the gun” with “out on the run.” (That doesn't sound specific enough. It may be a recurring lyrical motif in the Jovi canon.) I didn't know, or didn't remember, the specific song, but seeing Heather dance to it, well, that was a different matter. The way she moved—chin up high, a slow hip shuffle that was like stirring pancake batter—was seared into my subconscious.

“I love this song,” she said, her smile beaming.

“I fucking hate this,” I said.

And we both laughed. Because we both already knew it, but it had taken me twenty-five years to admit it.

I could understand why this whole evening might seem a little suspicious. A married man drives out to the suburbs to see an old flame, brings along a bottle of wine and a bunch of old records they used to listen to, it wouldn't be unfair to wonder if maybe the intentions weren't entirely chaste. But Kelly was well aware of what was happening, and she was fine with it. It may have been because she knew that Heather was happily married . . . to a lovely African-American woman named Amanda.

We listened to the second half in its entirety, even though it was the half without any of the hits. Except I guess that “Never Say Goodbye” song, which I vaguely recall slow-dancing to with her.

“What else do you have in there?” she asked, nudging at the loose mountain of records on her kitchen table.

I had a few things. In the weeks leading up to this visit, I made several record-buying excursions—I went to Dave's Records, in Chicago's Lincoln Park, and the Reckless Records in Wicker Park. I picked up as many of the old records from our youth as I could remember. Not the stuff I brag about when I'm with middle-aged friends and I want to make it seem like I was way more musically sophisticated than I was. “Oh yeah, I only listened to Joy Division and the Smiths in high school.” No, I mean the music I actually consumed as a teenager in the 1980s, while dancing awkwardly during junior high dances, or playing spin the bottle during birthday parties. I brought a few Police records, a few Phil Collins records, some U2, and a badly warped Duran Duran forty-five.

And also, the things I would have listened to with a teenage girl, if given the chance. Like the
Barbarella
soundtrack. At some point during my sexually impressionable years, I got it into my head that
this album could act as a sort of aphrodisiac. Inspiring . . . I don't know what. A girl to do a striptease in zero gravity? I was never clear on what I was expecting, just that it would subliminally suggest something that a Huey Lewis record couldn't accomplish.

I watched her eyes as she looked through the records, and I felt that old anxiety again, of watching a woman review your musical tastes in real time. When she smiled, that meant I'd done something right, that I'd proved myself worthy somehow. When she gasped, her jaw falling open like she'd momentarily lost motor function, oh, that gave me a special sense of pride, as if I'd somehow personally choreographed the endorphin rush of nostalgia.

“Did he always have a mustache?” Heather asked, gazing at a Lionel Richie record.

“Lionel Richie? You're asking me if Lionel Richie had a mustache?”

“I'm serious.”

“So am I,” I said. “How do you not know that Lionel Richie has a mustache? That's like asking if Bon Jovi had enormous hair.”

She laughed. “I'm sorry, I'm not big on facial hair. I try not to notice things like that.”

I didn't imagine that it'd be that easy, that she'd just broach the subject herself, directly address the elephant in the room, without me having to bring it up awkwardly. The Mustache Question, which seemed so important back in 1986, easily the most important question you could ask, or at least just a notch or two below “What happens after we die?” It was so big, so massive in its significance that it stayed with me, lodged in my brain long after it didn't have any significance. But I still wanted to know. I needed to know.

“Was it the mustache?” I asked.

She didn't hear me. She was too focused on trying to remember the lyrics to whatever Lionel Richie song was being blasted through
tinny speakers. So I waited, and wondered if I was just asking questions I already knew the answer to.

During one of my recent record-store visits, I'd stumbled upon an old Hüsker Dü EP, the “Eight Miles High / Makes No Sense At All” split side that was my introduction to the band. I loved it instantly, if only because it was so aggressively not the Thompson Twins. I listened to both songs on a constant loop for an entire weekend—flipping and then reflipping the record every three minutes—until I'd committed every wail and clattering guitar riff to memory.

I studied the black-and-white photo of the band on the cover like some teenage boys study pornography. Bob Mould looked like me—pudgy, pale, uncomfortable in his own skin, yet somehow infinitely cooler. And that other guy, Greg Norton, with his unimaginable handlebar mustache. He looked ridiculous, and yet somehow personified everything I wished I could be. It was like two little middle fingers sprouting out of both sides of his upper lip, a preemptive strike against the world.

I stared at that mustache for endless hours, the same songs pounding into my head over and over, and I came out the other side thinking, “Nothing wrong with a mustache. That's punk rock, man. That's how you stick it to the man.”

It was around this same time that I was getting deeply immersed in late sixties and seventies white-guy rock. Which was basically an entire era of music devoted to the idea that growing a 'stache was something that made you desirable and fucking awesome. The proof was everywhere, staring back at me from endless record sleeves. Frank Zappa, Duane Allman, Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart, Bryan Ferry, Thin Lizzy's Phil Lynott, the
Sgt. Pepper's
–era Beatles, the Nuge, Jim Croce, John fucking Bonham, everyone in Black Sabbath but Ozzy (especially Tony Iommi, the man who invented the
heavy metal riff). And Lemmy! For the love of all that is unholy, Lemmy! The album cover for Motörhead's
Ace of Spades
is the kind of thing a teenage boy looks at with breathless wonder and promises to pledge allegiance to whatever dark lord will help him grow something even a fraction as menacing on his upper lip.

Heather, meanwhile, was very much immersed in popular bands of the day. She was into modern pop like Duran Duran, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Van Halen, Journey, the Smiths, Whitesnake, Simple Minds, the Human League. What do all of these bands have in common? Not a single mustache among them. Mustaches in 1986 were very much an African-American face fixture. A little lip hair looked fine on Prince or Luther Vandross or Lionel Richie or Quincy Jones. The only Caucasian singers she saw with flavor savors were John Oates and Freddie Mercury and that guy in Toto.

So when I grew my mustache in 1986, that was her only comparison. She looked at me and thought, “He's trying to be John Oates.” But in my head, I was like, “I'm so obviously a cross between Greg Norton and Lemmy.” That's what I saw when I considered my reflection in the mirror. I wanted to be Greg Norton! But she'd never heard of Hüsker Dü. They never played their videos on MTV, or at least not during the prime after-school hours.

That was my theory. That's why she broke up with me about a year later, broke my heart into a million pieces. It was because of the mustache. Which was because we were listening to different records. Or more specifically, she was listening to the wrong records.

If she'd just bothered to spend a weekend obsessing over Hüsker Dü's “Eight Miles High,” she'd know where I was coming from.

“Seriously,” I said, when she'd finally gotten tired of Lionel Richie. “It was the mustache, wasn't it?”

She laughed, finally understanding what I was asking. “A little bit, it was, yeah,” she said.

“A little bit? Come on!”

“Okay, a lot. I hated the mustache. I really, really hated it.”