Old Records Never Die (22 page)

We did this for a minute, and then Bob said, “You want some more ganja?”

“Fuck yes,” I said.

He rolled another joint, and we smoked it, and then he put on more music. I had no idea what it was. Possibly something from Zimbabwe.

I kept flipping. There were amazing records in these boxes. And
also, some really awful ones. Records that deserved to be abandoned and forgotten. And yet here they were, sharing space, like Albert Einstein living in the same retirement community as a guy who used to work at Costco.

I wondered how these records ended up in the same box. How had
Christmas with Nat & Dean
come to live alongside David Lee Roth's
Crazy from the Heat
? Or
Jane Fonda's Workout Record
managed to share an eternal resting place with
De La Soul Is Dead
? What were the circumstances in which anything by Dan Fogelberg would become box besties with the Jesus and Mary Chain?

Does something like that just happen on its own, by accident? Or had these particular albums been placed together on purpose? The way Bob described it, they'd just been dumped into boxes without any attempt at order or clarity. So maybe this was how they had arrived at Record Swap—cardboard snapshots of the previous owners' lives at a very specific time. It was like looking at deep-sea photos of the sunken
Titanic
, and being transfixed by a rusty old stopwatch, still sitting at the bottom of the sea, right where it'd been left by its owner before he went and drowned. You see something like that, and you feel like you know somebody that you never actually knew.

Bob reappeared from behind his shelves, carrying another box over to me. I didn't know where he kept finding them, or where he brought boxes when I'd rejected them. There seemed to be more boxes down here than actual square footage.

“She only listens to boy bands,” he said, as he dropped the box at my feet. “It's all got to be Top 40 radio hits. That's the only thing she's interested in.”

My mind had wandered, but Bob had kept talking. “Your . . . daughter?” I asked, making a lucky guess.

He nodded, solemnly. “She's in high school now,” he said.

“It's a stubborn age,” I said, as if I had any idea.

“I bought her a turntable and she broke it right away. She doesn't want anything to do with it. She doesn't even understand why you would want a record.”

“It's not just her,” I said. “It's all of them.”

“You know what's going to happen?” Bob said, pinching what was left of the joint and relighting it. “Eventually we'll all just have a chip in our head. We'll download a book, or a song. It'll be uploaded while you sleep so it'll go directly into your head. You won't even have to listen to it! You'll just remember it. You'll know the song without ever having to actually have the experience of listening to it.”

I paused on a battered copy of Prince's
Around the World in a Day
. A record that always makes me think of my dad.

It was 1985, maybe 1986. I was supposed to be going to prom with Heather, but she'd recently broken up with me for another guy. Rather than ask somebody else, I opted just to skip prom entirely, and spend the evening instead alone in my bedroom, with the lights out, quietly flagellating myself for being unlovable, feeding buckets of chum to my self-made beast of self-pity.

But my dad, recognizing the signs of teenage ennui, wouldn't let me do it. He dragged me out of my room, took me on a “guys' night out,” which included eating fast-food burgers in a parking lot and then going to the Record Bar in Lincoln Mall to buy records. We shared no musical interests, so the idea of browsing a record store with him seemed awful. I just assumed it'd be like smoking a joint with a parent (which, for the record, I've never, ever done); something I normally enjoy rendered totally unfun, self-conscious, and awkward.

But he proved to be the perfect vinyl wingman. He stuck to his sections—country and western, mostly—and I stuck to mine. He didn't pretend to be anything he wasn't, and he didn't ask questions I didn't want to answer. When I settled on
Around the World in a
Day
, he just nodded and said, “Looks cool.” He didn't make me explain that I didn't really like Prince all that much, except for that “Let's Go Crazy” song, but liking Prince seemed cool, or at least cool among the handsome, athletic, self-confident guys at school who had girlfriends, and I wanted to be like the handsome, athletic, self-confident guys at school who had girlfriends. Prince was a little freaky to me. He seemed like an oversexed midget who needed to take a chill pill and relax with the thrusting. But when you're spending prom night in a mall with your dad, it's hard to be judgmental of the pop singer who seems to be getting laid constantly.

My dad bought it for me, and we drove home saying nothing, which is exactly what I needed at that moment. I couldn't tell you a single song from that record. I think one of them was about a beret. But I remember riding shotgun in my dad's car on a weirdly hot night in April, through the shitty Chicago suburbs that I hated and couldn't wait to leave, not listening to the radio and not even saying much of anything to my dad, just holding on to that Prince record, feeling a little more comfortable in my skin because I was cool enough to buy it, and maybe I wasn't getting cool enough to get laid in the back of a limo after prom, but goddammit, I was getting closer.

“Is that yours?” Bob asked.

I pulled out the disk and tried to study the markings.

“I don't know,” I said. I really didn't. I remembered scratches—many, many scratches—but were any of these mine? How could I possibly know?

“Did it have the perforated flap?” he asked.

The flap! The unnecessary cardboard flap that served no purpose other than making the gatefold feel like a big, awkward manila folder. I remembered the flap! And I remembered not tearing it, not out of respect for maintaining a mint condition for future collectability, but just because I didn't understand why it was there and
what tearing it off would mean. Removing it seemed as dangerous as cutting off the
DO NOT REMOVE
tag on a mattress; an act with likely no consequence, but better to be safe than sorry.

“I definitely had the flap,” I told him.

“You're sure?” he said. “I've seen a lot of these records without the flap.”

“No, I know the flap was there. I wouldn't get rid of the flap.”

“You need to listen to it,” Bob offered.

“Right now?”

“No, just take it. Take it.”

“I couldn't.”

“Take it home,” he insisted. “You won't know until you play it at home, be alone with it for a while.”

“This is nuts,” I said.

“It's not nuts,” Bob said, firmly. “You have to believe in it. You have to believe.”

I don't know why it mattered so much to him. It was like once he changed his mind about me, once he decided that I was doing something worthwhile, that I was righting an injustice, repairing some wound that wouldn't scab over on its own, it became personal for him.

I was the sick dog he'd found shivering under an overpass during a storm. When he brought me home, wrapped me in a blanket, and put me in his car, he'd made a commitment to nurse me back to health. If I didn't walk out of here, with all my records, it would haunt him.

Or maybe I was projecting. I was pretty stoned.

A half dozen joints had done the job!

Bob did a lot of talking as I flipped through records. We were long past the stage of polite banter and “can you believe this snow?” superficialities. When you're stuck in the same room with a guy for
enough hours, listening to records and smoking weak dope, it acts as a social laxative. You forget that you're essentially strangers, and you start sharing things you probably shouldn't be sharing.

He told me, for instance, about his brief career as a concert promoter during the nineties—while he was still running the Record Swap—for Zimbabwe singer Thomas Mapfumo, who was apparently very popular with prostitutes and criminals back in his own country.

“I remember once, at one of the gigs in California, he was trying to impress these girls,” Bob said. “He told them, ‘I paid five hundred dollars for these Italian shoes.' I pointed out that he should probably invest in a better sound system. He put a death threat out on me.”

He told me about the home he owned in Zimbabwe, which he'd been trying to sell to pay for his daughter's upcoming college tuition. But he had no takers, since the place was in a dangerous part of Zimbabwe and, by Bob's own admission, “The police don't come out there.”

He told me about his marriage to a woman named Patience, a backup singer in Mapfumo's band, the Blacks Unlimited. He told me about visiting her family in Zimbabwe, and how her dead grandmother possessed her one night while they were sleeping in the guest room, which really freaked Bob out, but then the grandfather had a talk with Patience and he realized why his wife had possessed her.

“He went out to his front yard and he started digging,” Bob said. “He dug and he dug and he dug. And he found this little packet of herbs that somebody had put in his yard. It was a curse, and the grandmother had used Patience as a conduit from beyond the grave to warn him about it. At least that's what he said.”

These were hard stories to compete with. But I tried. I told him about my own marriage—how I met Kelly in Chicago, and invited her to a Soul Coughing show in 1996. That was our first date. Every time I hear “Uh, Zoom Zip,” I still get the goose-bumpy thrill of wondering
if I'll get to see my wife's boobs that night. I made her a mix tape before the show, to impress her with my knowledge of Brooklyn hipster musicology. It did the job—obviously, because she married me—and I never made another mix tape again. Partly because it's never a good idea to make a mix tape for somebody you're not fucking or trying to fuck, because a mix tape is nature's way of saying “I totally want to fuck you. Please allow these songs to explain why.”

Also, there is no such thing as mix tapes anymore. If you say to somebody “I would like to make a mix tape for you,” their first reaction—if they're older than thirty—will likely be: “You're married. Stop trying to fuck me.” And if they're under thirty, they'll look you right in the eyes and ask, “What is a mix tape?” And then you can either explain what a cassette tape is or slink toward the nearest exit, the latter of which is probably a better idea, because she's right, you're way too married to be flirting with her that hard, and she's far too young to give a shit about “Super Bon Bon.”

John Coltrane's
A Love Supreme
was blaring from Bob's turntable. And I'd never liked the album more. Growing up, I'd pretended to like this record on numerous occasions. Like how I pretended to appreciate
Bitches Brew
or
Kid A
or anything by Captain Beefheart. But in this basement, as a soundtrack to this conversation, Coltrane's screeching saxophone added just the right amount of gravitas. It made the whole room dissolve into gritty black and white.

“Are you EJS?” I heard Bob ask.

He pointed toward Guns N' Roses'
Appetite for Destruction
, the album I was holding without even realizing it. And sure enough, right there at the top, were three letters that looked like initials. Which just so happened to be my initials.

“Holy shit,” I managed to say.

“That's yours, right? It has to be yours.” Bob's voice had risen a few octaves.

“It might be mine.”

“Of course it's yours! Why would it not be yours?”

I traced a finger along the Sharpie trail. “It doesn't feel familiar,” I said.

“What does that even mean?” Bob exclaimed.

“Maybe it's somebody else's. I'm not the only one with those initials. If I'd just written my whole name, this wouldn't—”

Bob disappeared behind the shelves and reappeared with a notebook and pencil. “Write your initials and we'll compare them,” he said.

I did as he asked.

“You're not trying,” Bob insisted.

But that wasn't true. If anything, I was trying too hard. I was trying to focus on what was unique about my handwriting. And that's like trying to think about riding a bicycle while you're riding a bicycle.

My initials back then—if it was indeed my actual initials—were more carefree, with softer corners and bigger, cartoonish loops. Today, my initials are kind of severe, with sharp, unbending lines. Or maybe I just don't know how to write my own signature anymore. Why would I? You can do all that stuff with computers now. I haven't signed a document with my own name since I was young-enough looking to get carded at bars. I knew as much about signing my own name as I knew about how to find a checkbook in my home office.

“Maybe my handwriting has changed,” I said. “Like how your fingerprints change.”

“Your fingerprints don't change,” Bob said. “Unless you get your fingertips cut off in a shop accident.”

“I thought the epidermis could peel off.”

“The epidermis can, sure. But not the dermis. That needs to be scarred before your fingerprint changes.”

“Didn't John Dillinger have his fingerprints removed?”

“Yeah, I think I read that.”

I eventually conceded to take the
Appetite for Destruction
, just to keep things moving. And as the search continued, any time I hesitated, he insisted that it might be mine, and I set it aside to take home with me. I had a stack of records by Big Star, R.E.M., Curtis Mayfield, Paul Simon, Talking Heads, Jane's Addiction, Buzzcocks, and Echo and the Bunnymen—all with small and almost undetectable blemishes, rips, stains, frayed edges, and zigzagging scratches that were like mini–Rorschach tests. He didn't care how much I protested, or how much I said they weren't mine. When I tried to shove them back into the box, he'd just pull them out again.