Old Records Never Die (16 page)

I flipped through my stack of records, looking for the Hüsker Dü EP, which I'd brought because . . . I don't know. To prove a point? To show her that she was wrong to dump me in the empty stands of that baseball field next to my house? Because, look, Greg Norton was cool. She'd made a mistake!

Heather, meanwhile, had picked out another selection. She dropped the needle, and I heard the unmistakable piano opening of “Don't Stop Believin'.” Which just so happened to be my wedding song. “I guess I never liked the way it felt,” she said. “It felt weird.”

“Felt weird how?” I asked.

“You know.” She was starting to blush. “I have gotten . . . burned. In that area.”

“Your lady business,” I said matter-of-factly, almost exactly when Steve Perry was telling us to hold on to that feeling.

“It was not one of my favorite sensations, obviously,” she said.

“Wow. I was going to try and defend myself, but I guess I owe you an apology.”

“We're talking some serious chafing, dude. Doesn't matter how sweet a guy is, that's kind of a deal breaker.”

We paused and listened to Journey. There really wasn't much else to say. I'd brought along the Hüsker Dü EP—it was my slam-dunk evidence that she'd been all wrong about mustaches—but it was clearly useless now. I could imagine Greg Norton on the cover, his smile gone, his once-proud mustache wilted, shrugging, saying, “Don't look at me, why are you taking life advice from album covers anyway?”

“Oh my god, speaking of mustaches!”

Heather had pulled out
Attila
, and held it high, like a Baptist minister might brandish a Bible. The album, of course, is Billy Joel's
presolo 1970 metal power duo, featuring Joel playing an oppressively loud Hammond B-3 organ. And on the cover, he and his drummer are dressed as Huns, surrounded by slabs of meat. It is an awe-inspiring cover—matched only by the epic loudness of the music—and sure enough, Joel is wearing a mustache that fits the inane tableau perfectly.

“Even Billy Joel knew this was a bad idea,” Heather declared.

“Bad idea how?”

“He never had a mustache after this, did he? He shaved it and never looked back.”

“He never did another album with a bunch of raw meat on the cover again either. That doesn't make it a bad idea.”

“Oh, come on.” She picked up
The Stranger
and placed it next to
Attila
. “Which one of these is a better Billy Joel? The one with a mustache in the body armor and kilt, or the one in a suit and no facial hair?”

This wasn't an easy question to answer. Because on one hand, sure, I guess
The Stranger
Billy Joel is conventionally cooler. But I'm drawn—I've always been drawn—to
Attila
Billy Joel. The one who looks like he might be smoking cigarettes behind a 7-Eleven. The other one,
The Stranger
Billy Joel, looks like somebody who dates supermodels and does a lot of cocaine. But the
Attila
Billy Joel, he's the one who goes to ren fairs, had his last sexual experience in the parking lot of a community college, and wouldn't be caught dead singing a song like “She's Always a Woman.”

My parents love
The Stranger
Billy Joel. My dad, a pastor, thought “Only the Good Die Young” was hilarious. But they're a little freaked out by the
Attila
Billy Joel. Once, I was playing “Wonder Woman” way too loud in my bedroom, and my dad banged on the door, shouting from the hallway, “I don't know who's melodically raping a cat in there, but please make them stop!” I loved that.
His anger about
Attila
made
The Stranger
–loving part of myself seem a little less conspicuous.

I've spent most of my adult life trying to deny the full extent of my Billy Joel fandom. But it's there. It's always been there. I have, on several occasions, air-pianoed to “Angry Young Man” in front of a mirror. I've attended several Billy Joel concerts, two during the
Innocent Man
tour, and in every case I was disappointed that he didn't play more “deep cuts.” And I've carefully evaluated the romantic subtext of almost every song in the Billy Joel canon, determining exactly how much they communicated the complicated emotions I was feeling toward the girls I wanted to have sex with, and then I would record those songs onto cassettes, along with other songs that shared similarly sexual or romantic themes, and then deliver those cassettes to the aforementioned girls who I hoped would listen to these mix tapes and decide, based on the airtight arguments contained within the songs, to have sex with me—including one girl who grew up to become a woman who would marry another woman and with whom I'm currently eating fancy cheese and drinking Michigan wine.

“I want you to know, I thought you were really cool for liking him,” Heather said, somewhere around the middle of “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.”

I smirked at this, and poured myself more wine. “You're being kind.”

She picked up another Joel record,
52nd Street
. “Look at him,” she said, pointing at the cover. “He's so New York cool.”

“He's standing in an alley with a trumpet.”

“That's cool!”

“He doesn't know how to play a trumpet.”

“That just makes it cooler.”

“It's the exact opposite.”

“You're too cynical,” she said.

“If I walked into a bar with a trumpet and somebody asked me, ‘Do you play?' And I was like, ‘Nope. I just like walking around with a trumpet,' the entire bar would be justified in getting off their stools and collectively beating me into a bloody pulp.”

She turned the record over, holding it delicately by the sides, and then placing the needle onto the vinyl like she was pulling a sliver out of a child's finger.

“Well, I thought you were cool,” she said, almost absentmindedly.

“You're saying that to make me feel good.”

“Well, what did I know? I listened to this.” She pointed to the Bon Jovi record. “Billy Joel seemed more mature. Kids our age weren't supposed to like guys who wore ties. You were the only guy I knew who was into him. And that was intimidating.”

“Stop it. Why am I just hearing this now?”

She smiled, but I don't think she was really listening. Her head was swaying in little figure eights as she mouthed the words like she was reciting the Lord's Prayer.

I still couldn't wrap my head around what she'd just told me. It was the exact opposite of everything I'd been bracing myself for. I was prepared to have her tell me that I ruined any romantic future we might've had because of that thing I grew on my face that I thought looked like a Hüsker Dü album cover. Or that pretending to like Bon Jovi so that I could touch a girl's boobies is exactly as creepy as it sounds. But this was not on the agenda. This was like opening up an old high school yearbook and realizing that you actually did look like Ferris Bueller.

We kept talking, and playing records. Sometimes we talked about the records, and sometimes the records were just background noise.

While we listened to the Police's
Ghost in the Machine
, we talked
about what her room looked like in the other house, a few miles from here.

“It had rainbow wallpaper,” she said. “Which perhaps, in retrospect, should have been a clue.”

“Weren't there unicorn posters?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, a whole lot of unicorn posters,” she said. “And Duran Duran posters. It was like a sea of magical horse horns and John Taylor haircuts. Oh, and also posters of gymnasts from the 1984 Olympics. I was living the life.”

During side one of U2's
The Joshua Tree
, we talked about my car, the one I drove during high school, which I'd inherited from my grandmother. A Plymouth Valiant from the midseventies that Heather had dubbed the Shit-Mobile. During the entirety of “With or Without You,” we debated whether it was maroonish or a dehydrated poop color.

For side two of
The Joshua Tree
, we talked about my hair, which was apparently something that concerned me as a teenager. “You used to get so upset about it,” she told me. “You didn't know how to get it cut, and you said if you let it grow it would stick out all over. It was a thing. You kept it short on purpose so that wouldn't happen.”

We skipped around the Monkees'
Greatest Hits
, bypassing songs like “She” and “Listen to the Band,” and playing “Pleasant Valley Sunday” three times in a row. During those repeated plays of “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” she told me about the time she and our mutual friend Christine inadvertently discovered Christine's mom's vibrator.

I didn't hear a single note of Genesis's
Invisible Touch
, I was so engrossed in Heather's explanation of her first marriage, to a guy who loved Phil Collins so much that “he used to say that Phil Collins was the only man he could picture himself fucking.” He also argued that they should name their first child Collins, as a tribute to the little bald British man who invented the word
sussudio
.

“We had a deal,” she told me. “I'd pick the girl's name and he'd pick the boy's name.”

“You were actually going to let him do it?” I asked.

“He was really passionate about it. What could I say?”

“Your daughter has no idea how lucky she is to have not been born with a penis.”

“Oh, she knows.”

While trying to play the “Hungry Like the Wolf” forty-five—which was so badly warped, it was like dropping the needle onto an undercooked pancake—she told me about her first date with a woman, which just so happened to be at a Duran Duran concert. And that her taste in women was “more Pierce Brosnan 007 than Sean Connery 007. Not really masculine but not super feminine either. A little dykey, but with softer features.”

“Pierce Brosnan is dykey?”

“Well, of the James Bonds, he's the dykey-est.”

During Prince's
Sign o' the Times
, we talked about our respective wives, and how amazing they were, and how much we loved them, and how they were likely the only two women in the world trusting enough to let their respective spouses spend an evening drinking wine and listening to records with a former lover.

“Amanda said, ‘What are you doing today?' And I was like, ‘Eric's coming over.' And she's like, ‘Oh yeah, you're going to relive your high school days, right? Should I worry about you guys making out on the couch?'”

I shrugged and slowly pulled a record from out of the stack. “Well, that is kinda why I brought
Barbarella
.”

Heather laughed so hard, I swear I saw a little wine come out of her nose.

“Wait, we're not making out to
Barbarella
?” I asked. “Well, why the hell did I drive out here?”

“Absolutely,” she said, pouring us both another glass. “I put my date underwear on and everything.”

“You've still got date underwear?”

There was no sexual tension. But there was intimacy, in a way I hadn't experienced with an old friend in longer than I could remember. I'd been Facebook friends with Heather for years. I “liked” her pictures, read all her updates, thought I knew her. But I knew nothing about her. She was a stranger to me. It took three hours, two bottles of wine, and a bunch of records coming apart at the seams to find her again.

Were the records really necessary? Couldn't we have just met at some local bar and had the same experience? Maybe, I don't know. Maybe just talking would've been enough. But the records felt like an indispensable part of what happened.

There's an old tavern near our apartment that Kelly and I used to visit almost every week. It became a fixture for us. It's where we went for birthdays. It's where we brought friends when they visited. It's where we've commiserated over scary news, and celebrated when that scary news became awesome news. It's where we came during winter storms when we just had to get out of the house, and where we came during spring when we just had to get out of the house. Charlie had his favorite table, and his favorite waitresses who all knew his name. When you went upstairs—and we always went upstairs, because that's what Charlie demanded—you had to be careful at the top step, because it was weirdly shaped, and a little higher than the other steps. When the host seated most people, they warned them about the step. But we'd been there enough that they stopped warning us. And even Charlie started saying, “Look out for the step!” And the waitstaff would all laugh.

One day, the tavern burned down. We heard conflicting stories about what happened—it was either a grease fire or a rogue cigarette,
or some combination of the two—but the building just . . . disappeared. I didn't know how to explain to Charlie. It was like having to explain death to him, but more difficult, because I had to explain how walls and buildings are important, and why it's okay to miss them when they're gone.

The owner promised that he'd rebuild, but that seemed pointless. The thing that was lost, it was lost forever. You couldn't rebuild what burned down. How could you do that? It wouldn't be exactly the same. It'd be something different, something that looked vaguely similar but unconvincing to anyone who actually knew better. There wouldn't be the same badly constructed step that only regulars know not to trip over.

The step was important. The step is what made it feel like our own. Without the step, it might as well have been an Olive Garden.

That's a hard truth you learn pretty quickly with adulthood. The things that make experiences unique disappear. Because it's not the broad strokes that matter. It's the top step that's just an inch too high, that catches your foot if you're not paying attention.

It's the scratches on a Billy Joel record.

Heather put on
Cold Spring Harbor
. Because she wanted to hear “She's Got a Way,” which is apparently a song I should have paid more attention to. (The song, not the mustache that Joel sported on the album cover. Somehow, this rock 'stache had snuck under her radar.)