Old Records Never Die (19 page)

A most spectacular manner—that's how my friend had described the way his wife's adult diaper had exploded when he'd
thrown it against the wall. She was dying from cancer, and one night, the frustration and anger about everything that was happening to him and the woman he loved got the better of him, and he threw the diaper against the wall. And it exploded. Like a water balloon. In a most spectacular manner, he told me later.

Kelly and I both looked at the shards and tried to think of what to say.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean . . . That was . . .”

“I know,” I said.

“I'm just a little upset.”

“I know,” I agreed. “I can see that.”

“I'm trying to be supportive of this thing. This . . . record-collecting thing, or whatever it is you're doing. But it's starting to get irresponsible.”

“Because of
Cocksucker Blues
?”

I watched her face scrunch up, like she was wincing from a migraine. “No. No, it's not the— I mean, yes, I don't get the tape. I thought this was just about old records.”

“It is,” I said. “Nothing has changed.”

“I'm trying to understand,” she said. “You're not going to start bringing home VHS box sets of
Bosom Buddies
or something, are you?”

“Absolutely not,” I said. I reached for her hand and squeezed it gently like I'm pretty sure guys do when they've been caught cheating.

She pulled her hand away. “This has just not been a good time for this.”

I knew what she meant. Money was tight. Money's always tight when you're a freelance journalist, but it was especially so in recent months. We had an IRS bill that somehow managed to get larger every month. Our health insurance—which I'd gotten because of my column for MTV Hive, a website whose continued existence surprised even its full-time staff—would sometimes sporadically
disappear without notice, usually just before a pediatrician visit for Charlie. Some weeks, we could afford to grocery shop at Whole Foods. On other weeks, we were at the grocery store with a “cheap meat” special on Tuesdays. We had no savings, no nest egg, and owned literally nothing. The bank even had the title to our car.

I had just spent a weekend in Nashville. Not for pleasure, for work. I flew down to interview Dolly Parton for a German magazine,
Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin.
The whole experience was epically awesome and weird. It's weird enough meeting Dolly Parton, but especially so when you go into it knowing that the conversation will eventually be translated into German. It makes you self-conscious about the way you speak. Which is something you're doing anyway, being in the same room with Dolly Parton. But the German thing adds another layer to it.

The trip was completely paid for by the Germans, of course. The plane, the hotel, the rental car, all of it was covered. And eventually, somewhere down the line, I'd actually be paid for the interview—maybe when it got published, maybe before, maybe long afterward, it was anyone's guess. But all in all, it was good news. In our financially unstable world, it was a win.

Or it would have been, if I hadn't visited those three record stores in Nashville, and made those completely unnecessary purchases.

It had been a bad decision from the beginning. Logically, I knew there was no way that any of my records were in these stores. But sitting alone in a hotel room, in a city where music is literally everywhere—they pipe in country tunes at the crosswalks—my brain started to play tricks on me. Two decades is a long time, and it wasn't outside the realm of possibility that something from my old collection made the cross-country trip. Maybe not in one shot, but state by state, over the course of a dozen or so years. It could have made the five-hundred-mile journey in the back of a U-Haul truck,
or many U-Haul trucks, as it got passed along and resold and donated, several times over, until it found its way to Nashville.

In my head, it made sense.

I spent almost an entire morning at a store called Grimey's, where both the customers and the employees looked like Bon Iver, and all the college girls wore black jeans and tiny black shirts that exposed their shiny navel rings. The Rolling Stones section had only a copy of Mick Jagger's
Primitive Cool
, but a pristine-looking
Exile on Main St.
hung on the wall, out of reach for anybody without a ladder, next to a price tag that read
ONLY $169.99
.

I'd bought a few things that I shouldn't have. Like a Temple of the Dog record. It wasn't mine, and I knew as much. But I couldn't imagine a scenario in which I'd ever hear “Hunger Strike” again, and I really wanted to.

I also picked up a copy of Cheap Trick's
At Budokan
. It absolutely wasn't mine. This was made abundantly clear by the graffiti written on the back, which read: “This is Richard's. Steal it and I will poison you.” But I know a few Richards, and I'm pretty sure they're all Cheap Trick fans. So on the off chance that I could reunite one of them with his record, it seemed like a good risk for five dollars.

The biggest purchase was the VHS copy of
Cocksucker Blues
, the 1972 documentary about the Rolling Stones. I just stared at it for what must have been thirty minutes. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. My logical brain was saying, “Stop, you don't need that. Certainly not for fifty dollars.” Also, I can't remember the last time I owned a VCR. It's been ages. But despite all the evidence against it, every cell in my body was propelling me forward, forcing my hand to yank away that VHS tape before somebody else saw it and bought it first. If I didn't get it now, I'd never get another chance!

The first time I saw
Cocksucker Blues
, it felt like a miracle. The series of events that needed to happen for me to witness even one
frame of it was nothing short of alchemy. A friend of a friend knew a guy who lived with a guy who owned a third-generation copy he'd borrowed from some Russian mafioso. I watched every tedious, unedited, horribly produced, unbearably grainy second in grateful hushed silence. I watched it with the same reverence I had when I witnessed the birth of my son. “This is something that will never happen again. Don't you fucking dare even blink.”

But as much as my old brain was shouting at me to “GET IT GET IT GET IT NOW NOW QUICK,” my new brain, the one with Wiki-cynicism, who'd seen too much on Google to ever go back, knew that there was nothing special about
Cocksucker Blues
. I could go home right now and watch it on YouTube. I didn't need to pay for it. I certainly didn't need the movie in a box as big as a hardcover novel.

It wasn't precious anymore. It wasn't something you took the subway to the bad part of town to watch in a guy's garden apartment that smelled like rotting broccoli but you didn't care, because this moment wasn't going to happen again, and you could tell all your friends about it tomorrow and they'd be like “Holy shit, dude. What was it like?” And you'd talk about the sad and bored debauchery like it was life-affirming poetry. You talked about it like you talked about that time you saw
Faces of Death
and nearly vomited and then had nightmares for months, but it was worth it because you were part of an exclusive club that saw the thing that existed only in shadowy dangerous underworlds. It was a scar on your skin that was unique, and left a mark that was different from other people's scars.

That's not what
Cocksucker Blues
was anymore. It was just another thing you can watch on the Internet until you got bored after two minutes and went looking for something else.

But I bought it anyway.

All told, I didn't spend a lot of money. Maybe seventy dollars for everything, the records and the VHS tape. But the house of cards
that was our current financial situation meant that the unannounced disappearance of seventy dollars from our checking account was a recipe for disaster. While I was gone, Kelly had written a check for Charlie's day care, assuming there was exactly enough money to cover it until my next sporadic paycheck arrived, but now we were twenty dollars short, and so the check bounced, and she had to come up with an elaborate web of lies for the day care administrator.

“It was humiliating,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“No, you really don't. I am an adult woman. I do not appreciate being in a situation where I'm having to apologize for being broke because my husband emptied our bank account to buy records.”

“I totally get it,” I assured her.

“We are goddamn adults now. We need to start acting like goddamn adults.”

“It was a one-time thing,” I said, “and I promise it will never happen again.”

Her eyes were starting to glass over. “You can't promise that. You just can't. And that's fine, I understand, it's just . . .” She ran a finger across her eyes. “I'm just so tired.”

I knew what she meant. I was tired too.

Back in our twenties, an unpredictable money situation was just something we dealt with, rather than something we worried about constantly, or felt the weight of it crushing down on us. A few months after we started dating, I moved into her studio apartment—not officially, but it's where I slept every night for the first year we were together—and it was maybe five hundred square feet at most. But it never felt small. It was the perfect size, just as much as we needed. We'd lie in her bed all weekend, listening to music and having sex and laughing at jokes that were funny only to us, and it never felt like a jail cell.

Today, with a family and adult responsibilities, a dining room that's five hundred square feet feels oppressively small.

Kelly was right. We were goddamn adults now. And being a goddamn adult is no goddamn fun.

“I'll take the job,” I said.

“That's not what I'm saying,” Kelly stopped me.

“No, no, it's the right decision. It's the adult decision. I should do it. This freelancing thing is killing us.”

I'd been offered a job at
Men's Health
. As their deputy online editor. It would require moving to eastern Pennsylvania, where their offices were located. And commuting to an office every day, five days a week, and keeping regular hours. And wearing pants. (Not something I was required to do as a freelancer.) Also, the magazine was
Men's Health
, which meant I would likely be required to edit and write stories about fitness and nutrition and healthy lifestyles and glamour muscles and other things I had absolutely no knowledge of or interest in.

But, the salary was sizable, with more zeros than I was accustomed to. Money would just magically appear in our bank account every few weeks, in a predictable pattern, so that we could ostensibly plan a budget and have some financial stability and maybe even start a savings account.

This is what goddamn adults do.

“I don't want you to do it if you don't want to do it,” she said.

“I want to do it.”

“I don't believe you.”

“We can't live in this house anymore,” I insisted. “We're suffocating in here.”

“This isn't about the house. It's about leaving Chicago and moving to Pennsylvania and you wearing a tie every day. Are you sure this isn't what the records are about?”

I tried to look distracted, suddenly deciding that I had to start unpacking my bag from Nashville. “I wish you wouldn't keep bringing that up. One thing has nothing to do with another.”

“I think it does.”

“I've got something for you,” I said, digging deeper into my suitcase.

“I think you're freaked out about saying yes to this job, so that's why you're doing this record thing. You're clinging to the past because you're terrified of the future.”

I found it. Right at the bottom of my bag, under the clothes and the Dopp kit. I'd been hiding it, waiting for the right time to show her.

“This is for you,” I said, handing it to her.

She paused, staring disbelievingly at it. And then, just as I hoped, she burst into laughter.

“Seriously?” she asked. “Journey?”

Not just any Journey record. Journey's
Escape
. Or
E5C4P3
, if you want to get technical about it. The one with “Don't Stop Believin'” on it. The song that we'd played at our wedding in 1999, as the recessional.

It was a private joke, one that everybody at our wedding laughed about, but nobody but the two of us really understood.

Years before, when Kelly and I were barely dating, I invited her to join me for a party hosted by my then literary agent, at her summer home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. It was a preposterous thing to ask somebody you've known literally a week. “Hey, do you want to drive two hours up to Wisconsin to eat cheese and drink rosé with a seventy-year-old agent and a bunch of trade paperback writers?” But she said yes, and we borrowed a mutual friend's car, and made a weekend of it.

After the party, which was Gatsby-level ridiculous, we ended up driving around Lake Geneva, looking for a bar open past midnight. We found nothing, so we bought some beer from a gas station and
drank in the car outside our hotel. We listened to the radio, and when the local DJ invited callers to make a request, Kelly—lightheaded from too much beer—came up with a scheme.

She called the station, and using her best redneck voice, requested “Don't Stop Believin'” for her fiancé, who was serving overseas in the army or navy, she forgot which.

“‘Don't Stop Believin,' is our song, and we were listening to it when we made love the last time, so could you play it so he knows I'm thinkin' of him and he's gonna be a daddy and I miss him so goddamn much?”

When the song came on, we cheered and laughed and sang along, throwing open the car doors and dancing around the empty parking lot, screaming “Hold on to the feeeeeeling” to the night sky.