Old Records Never Die (18 page)

This unsolicited music lesson, which he soldiered on with despite the glaring lack of interest from everybody around him, is exactly why I first became enamored with Robert. He made people uncomfortable, but for all the right reasons. Because he was
just so excited
about this thing you couldn't care less about.

I met Robert on my first day at college—we made each other laugh with our impressions of Buddy Holly doing a bubbly cover of Prince's “Darling Nikki”—and together we ended up joining a
fraternity, TKE, mostly because their cafeteria was clearly superior to the dorm options. He was the one constant during my four years of college, despite the fact that our musical tastes were on opposite ends of the spectrum—he was to Engelbert Humperdinck what I was to Paul Westerberg—but we were just entertained enough by the other's animated enthusiasms to sit through music we might normally ignore.

Being down in that basement again, listening to records like we used to, getting way too excited about songs we were convinced mattered only to us—it was exhilarating. But not just because of the rush of memories. It was the audience. We weren't two old geezers having a private moment, reminiscing about the past. We were reenacting the past for a younger crowd who had to take our word for it.

We didn't come here to relive our past, because you can't do that. I'm not stupid enough to think I get a do-over. But I do like telling stories about myself. “You know that Bob Marley song, ‘No Woman, No Cry'?” I asked them. “What do you think that's about?”

Ulysses was the first to answer. “Not wanting your woman to cry?”

“No!” I countered. “That's the thing! It's the opposite. It's more literal than you think. You're adding too many extra words. It's not, ‘No, woman, you shouldn't be crying.' It's saying exactly what it seems to be saying.”

I got closer to Ulysses. “It's about cause and effect,” I half whispered into his ear. “One thing leads to another. No woman . . . no cry. You don't have a woman, ipso facto, you won't be crying. You see what I'm saying?”

“I think so,” he said.

Robert and I weren't stoned, but we were trying to show these guys, as accurately as possible, what it looked and sounded like to be stoned in a Midwestern frat basement in 1989. And that was somehow better. We didn't need the actual drugs. We didn't need the younger
bodies. Because we got to romanticize it. We got to play the part of us as we wanted to remember it. It was our personal Easter pageant.

It didn't last long. A good passion play requires an audience that sits in hushed silence and lets you finish the goddamn story. But this one didn't. They had their own stories, their own memories of college and music, most of which involved iPods or smartphones.

We watched the two of them stare down at their screens, scrolling through their massive MP3 libraries, looking for the perfect song to soundtrack this moment. But that's the problem when you've got instant access to forty thousand songs. You can't possibly pick just one without wondering if a better one is a few strokes away. So you keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and then the moment's over and whatever, might as well see what's happening on Twitter.

The perfect song for the moment is whatever happens to be playing.

We talked for at least an hour. They told us about their majors. And how the TKE kitchen doesn't have a cook anymore, so it's really just a place to keep a fridge. We told them about mix tapes, and how you won't win back somebody with a tape full of the Cure and Cocteau Twins songs. We talked about women, and whether college sex is as crazy for them as it was in the late eighties, when we just had regular gonorrhea and not “super” gonorrhea.

They told us their sex stories, and we told them ours, except ours came with epilogues, where a few of the women we had crazy college sex with went on to become Facebook friends who “like” our baby photos, or get breast cancer and then die in front of you on social media.

“That's the thing nobody tells you about growing older,” Robert says. “Nobody tells you that the girl you titty-fucked in the bar restroom when you were twenty is going to get breast cancer in twenty years, and you're going to go to her funeral with very complicated emotions.”

This information seemed to bum them out.

Eventually they went away—they had classes to go to, exams to study for, Instagram accounts to update—and it was just Robert and me, alone in the basement. We wandered upstairs and sat out on the back porch—which wasn't really a porch, just a glorified step with enough room for folding chairs and an ashtray. We plugged the Crosley into the electric socket just inside the back door, like we'd done with countless boom boxes back in our youth, and Robert pulled out another record: Elvis Presley's
That's the Way It Is
.

“Nice,” I said.

He went directly to the song we both needed to hear.

The first time I can remember listening to “I've Lost You”—side two, track two—I was nineteen and rip-roaring high.

Until that moment, I was not an Elvis fan. I knew his songs—I could probably hum a half dozen melodies from memory—but I had absolutely no interest in them. It wasn't until I was in a college dorm room, listening to “I've Lost You” on a record player that was made of cheaper plastic than a Happy Meal toy, as this ode to a crumbling marriage was narrated, and occasionally performed, by a wildly enthusiastic and equally stoned friend, that I realized an Elvis song—a fucking Elvis song—could make the hairs on my forearms stand on end.

“It's so clearly about Priscilla,” Robert told me, shouting over the drums and trumpets, his eyes practically glowing in the dark, smoke-filled room. “His marriage is falling apart, and he doesn't want to admit it, and he's fighting to keep her, and the baby's crying in the next room, and . . .”

The song surges, and Robert leaps out of his chair, assuming an Elvis-esque posture.

Oh, I've lost you, yes, I've lost you

I can't reach you anymore

I'd laugh and nod my head along to his epic pantomiming. Because at nineteen, I could appreciate the kitsch of a marriage falling apart melodramatically. I felt enough heartbreak to feel that sting of romantic disconnect. But the way Elvis was singing about it—with campy emotional devastation—it wasn't something that had anything to do with me. Even though it kinda did. I heard the song at the perfect moment, while grappling with the second major heartbreak of my young life. I knew what he was talking about, even as I wanted to laugh at his theatrical mawkishness.

It was my first experience with how emotional resonance can be even more powerful with ironic detachment.

That was in 1988. Almost twenty-five years later, I was hearing “I've Lost You” again, with the same guy from Wyoming who introduced me to it, just a short walk away from the dorm room where our weed-addled brains first decided that no song understood our pain—and was more worthy of being mocked for understanding our pain—quite like Elvis singing about his shitty marriage in 1970.

We sang like you might sing along to a Black Sabbath song. With pumping fists and thrusting groins. More appropriate for a song about Satan or recreational sex than a sad tale of a marriage on its last legs.

I sang it with a little more force than I did when I was nineteen. Because I understood the song a little more now. It made sense to me in ways it couldn't possibly when I'd just had my heart broken a measly two times. When you know what it feels like to feel friends slip away; or have careers not work out quite the way you intended; or parents who drop dead on you out of the blue, leaving you confused and angry and scared; or a partner you've committed yourself to for the long haul start to grow distant—not in big, knuckle-clenching, impossible-to-miss ways like it does in the movies, but in inches, just enough to make you wonder if you're crazy.

That's when you realize how bellowing, “I've lost you, yes, I've lost you, I can't reach you anymore” at the top of your lungs can be so cathartic and satisfying.

The song ended and Robert and I continued to talk. But our conversation drifted from bittersweet nostalgia into the murky details of our lives since we'd fallen out of touch. We told each other things that were awkward and embarrassing, things we regretted, things we were proud of, and more often than not, things we wished we could forget. AA meetings and mistresses and bad decisions and career missteps.

“It was like a music thing,” Robert told me, about the affair that nearly toppled his marriage. “It felt like this was my last love experience. Not real love, but the bullshit kind of obsessive love. I'd come home after seeing her, and listen to ‘Nights Are Forever Without You.' You know that song?”

“Yeah,” I said. “England Dan or something?”

“England Dan and John Ford Coley. It was probably their biggest hit.” Robert burst into the familiar melody, belting out the chorus: “‘I didn't know it would be so strong, waiting and wondering about yooooooou!'”

A few students walked past us, looking worriedly in our direction. We smiled and waved, and they moved on.

“I used to come home and crank that song and start rolling on the floor,” Robert told me. “I was like a teenage boy or something.”

I didn't ask him why he cheated on his wife. Or why she took him back. The only explanation he gave me was that song. And that was enough. I understand what he meant. And that was really all I needed.

We played our records while basking in the late winter sun, and watched people twenty-five years younger than us sit on the grass and do nothing. They did nothing spectacularly. Joyfully. I missed
doing nothing like that. Where nothing felt like something. Now, doing nothing seems laughably irresponsible.

I looked at them and felt jealous. Not for their youth, but for how much they seemed to enjoy doing nothing. They stretched and purred, like cats having their belly scratched, and ignored the books on their blankets, and yawned triumphantly.

I tried to think of the last time I let myself get away with doing nothing. I thought back on the year—the last several years—and all the endless busywork that dominated every day, the constant fear that I wasn't trying hard enough to be the best employee, the best husband, the best father.

I'd so forgotten what it felt like to do nothing that I didn't even realize I was right in the midst of doing it. Or not doing it. Doing nothing.

Robert dug through the records and pulled out a Cure album,
Disintegration
. I smiled in agreement and waited for those familiar chords.

“You know what's weird?” I asked Robert.

“What?”

“I can still remember my college mailbox locker combination.”

“The one from the mailroom downstairs?”

“Yep.”

“That's pretty impressive,” he said.

“Not really. It's also my debit card pin. It's my e-mail password. All of them. Every secret code I've had since my freshman year of college, I've used those four numbers.

“I feel like it might be a problem,” I said.

“It's a problem if you're concerned about being hacked.”

“It feels like a metaphor for my inability to let go of the past. I cling to those four numbers like I cling to everything else, like if I just hold on hard enough and don't let anything slip away ever, I'll be okay.”

“Are you worried about being a hoarder?” he asked.

“A selective hoarder. One who has emotional attachments to old mailbox combinations and very specific vinyl records.”

“I think you're being melodramatic. You're fine.”

“I'm a forty-five-year-old man listening to a Cure record on a college campus I graduated from twenty-four years ago.”

“Yeah? So?”

“On a Wednesday afternoon! It's not even like it's a weekend.”

“Why is that a big deal?”

“I have a family! A child who's probably wondering where the fuck I am. What am I doing here?”

Robert considered this, nodding thoughtfully like he knew the answer but he had to find the right words to make me understand.

“You know what would help?”

He paused, letting the Cure finish their thought before continuing.

“If we played some Boswell Sisters really, really loud.”

And so that's what we did.

A few weeks later, I was in the office of my apartment in Chicago, Charlie napping in the next room, having what I thought was a productive conversation with Kelly, my wife. At least it seemed productive until she threw the
Cocksucker Blues
VHS tape at me.

Even as the tape was hurtling toward me, I could tell by the expression on her face that it was an accident. The way she gasped, and put her hand over her mouth, like she couldn't actually believe what was happening.

I ducked, and the tape hit the wall behind me, and it exploded in a most spectacular manner.