Old Records Never Die (26 page)

The man was balding with a silver mustache and a tattoo on his left forearm of a bikini girl. The wife wore a red sweatsuit that made her look like a
Six Million Dollar Man
drag queen. While all three of us stared down at the boxes—our fingers flipping in such perfect symmetry that it almost sounded like crickets chirping—Silver Mustache told me about his regular summer job, as a Lollapalooza medic, which apparently involved mostly hanging out with Willie Nelson's son. His wife, who worked the night shift at a hotel where
all the touring musicians stayed, had her own stories of meeting rock royalty.

“I had the Temptations stay with us when Richard Street was still in the band,” she said. “I couldn't make the show, so they sang ‘My Girl' a cappella to me in the lobby of the hotel.”

“Tell him about Night Ranger,” Silver Mustache said.

“Total assholes,” she said. “Total assholes! The lead singer was, like, ‘You have to put me in as a pseudonym.' And I was like, seriously, dude? Nobody is going to call here looking for you, okay? But Debbie Harry, she was a different story. A real sweetheart. Nice as can be.”

Every few minutes, one of them would pull out a record and add it to the stack, which was growing into an unsteady mountain, ready to avalanche onto the floor.

“Are those all the records your brother stole?” I asked, pointing to the stack.

“Yep,” he said. “I've almost found them all. I didn't have anything too obscure, so it's not that difficult.”

“No, I mean the exact ones,” I said. “Did you try to find the exact ones he took?”

They both laughed. “How the fuck would I do that?” Silver Mustache asked, sneering at me under his mustache. “Talk to my brother's drug dealer, find out what flea market he sold my records to? What a colossal waste of time.”

I shrugged. “I could think of worse things to do.”

Silver Mustache narrowed his eyes at me, growing suddenly cold. “You're not one of those first-pressing weirdos, are you?”

“Oh no, no, not at all,” I said.

A smile returned to his face. “Good.”

“I want the cracks and whistles.”

“Yes! The cracks and whistles. That's what it's all about. This guy understands.”

I reached over and looked through his pile. I could sense both of them stiffening, uncomfortable with my greedy hands picking through territory they had already claimed. There weren't any major surprises there. A few Springsteens, a few Zeppelins, some Yes and Rush and Deep Purple and Steely Dan and a whole lot of Skynyrd—exactly what you'd expect from a guy with a silver mustache and bikini girl tattoo who grew up in the seventies.

And then I saw it. I recognized it almost immediately. Which is weird, because I'd studied at least two dozen of the same record trying to decide if any of them might be mine. But this time, I just knew. It was like the moment I imagined in my head, of seeing my dad in the crowd at a Mardi Gras parade, with his handlebar mustache and a safari hat. But I know it's him. There's not a question in my mind.

KISS
Alive II
. This was it. This was the one. This was the copy owned by my brother during our youth. The one I'd borrowed too many times, forcing him to deface the front cover with a “HANDS OFF!!!” warning. The message was gone. But there was a smudge at the top, right around the K in KISS, where someone had clearly tried to wipe away an ink stain. They managed only to make it illegible, but not to disappear. Like an old tattoo of an ex-girlfriend's name, some bad decisions can't ever be expunged completely.

“Can I have this?” I asked.

Silver Mustache looked at me, like you might look at a stranger you just discovered standing naked in your living room.

“Why?” he said, his voice now devoid of all friendliness.

“I've just been looking for this for a while, and I'd really like it.”

He glanced down at the record and then back at me. His hands dangled at his sides, like he was waiting to draw his gun for a duel.

“Is it rare or something?” he asked.

I tried to appear calm. “No, not rare especially,” I said, forcing a
laugh. “It's just something I'm nostalgic about, and I've been meaning to buy it, and, you know . . .”

He snatched it out of my hands and placed it back on his stack. “Sorry, man. Can't do it.”

“I'll give you a hundred bucks,” I said.

Our eyes locked in a showdown. His mustache twitched as he considered my offer.

“I don't know.”

“Two hundred.”

He looked at his wife, who was wide-eyed and unblinking, staring at me like I'd just pulled a knife on them. His mustache twitched again, and he ran a finger through it.

“Well,” he finally said. “I'll tell you what I'll do . . .”

“Three hundred.”

So much for not being one of those panicky Record Store Day assholes terrified of losing something rare.

Ric pushed past us with a baseball bat in his hand. He was chasing a homeless man, stinking of urine and booze, who had gotten into the store unnoticed.

“Get the fuck out of here, you fucking piece of shit,” Ric screamed, his voice thundering with believable rage.

I didn't move. Didn't stop staring at Silver Mustache. I was not going to let this go.

“You come back in here again,” Ric screamed out the front door, swinging the baseball bat like he was swatting flying monkeys out of the sky, “and I will fucking destroy you!”

“Deal,” Silver Mustache said.

As I drove alone on that six-hour trip up to Michigan, I would occasionally reach over to the passenger seat and touch the KISS
Alive II
, the most expensive piece of music I've ever bought in my life. Maybe this was cosmic retribution for all the music I've stolen
on the Internet in the last few years. But if you itemize it, it wasn't really that bad. There are twenty songs on KISS
Alive II
, so I basically paid fifteen dollars per song. Pricey, sure, but not highway robbery. If you want to be even more precise about it, I wasn't really buying the music at all but the album sleeve. So I paid three hundred dollars for what might be a now-illegible smudged-out threat from my prepubescent brother.

So fine, maybe that wasn't the smartest of financial investments. It's not valuable in any practical, real-world sense. But I don't regret anything.

This record is my talisman. It's the thing someone carries around because you think it's protecting you from evil or bad things. The logical part of your brain knows that it's horseshit. It's just a thing. It's not magical. It's not going to save you. But knowing it's there, being able to touch it whenever you feel uneasy, it makes you feel safe. Or at least safer.

It's stupid, and you know it's stupid, but you don't care.

I drove over the spot where the bump used to be. I waited for it, even though I knew it wouldn't come. And I was sad when the car didn't lurch forward, the shocks didn't protest angrily, I didn't feel the car lift into the air. But it was okay. It was less depressing this time.

Because I was bringing some bumps home again.

“Is he bleeding from his mouth?” my mom asked.

We were still sitting on the floor of Mark's bedroom, gazing up at the KISS poster. And I think she finally started to see it. How many years had she walked past it, or glanced up while tucking my brother in at night, and she'd never really noticed it? She got the general gist of it, but never paid attention to the details.

“He's always bleeding, Mom. That's kind of his thing.”

“Well, I don't know.” She shrugged. “You boys never explained this stuff to me.”

“And you're only asking these questions now?”

“We didn't know!” she protested. “You convinced us they were nice guys.”

“KISS?”

“Yeah. You were probably lying through your teeth. They were probably all on the LSD. It was such a racket. Every time you played those records, your father and I took a walk. It shook the whole house.”

“You could have taken the records away from us,” I said.

“We didn't want to be those kinds of parents,” she said. “It's just music, it's not going to kill anybody.”

We sat and looked at the poster again, and I wondered if it would be a good or bad idea to bring her downstairs right now and force her to listen to KISS
Alive II
. Really listen to it.

The front doorbell rang. It echoed through the empty house like a cavalry trumpet. My body stiffened. I wanted to hide somewhere, crawl into Mark's walk-in closet and turn out the lights.

“Do you think that's Mark?” my mom asked, beaming.

I didn't. I knew exactly who was waiting outside, bringing trouble to my doorstep.

I
know the right way to hold a record. You're supposed to cup it by the outer edges or center label. The less you actually touch, the better. All that oil on your hands is like acid to vinyl.

But the record I was currently holding—K-Tel's
Night Flight
—it really didn't matter what I was doing with my hands. Because the damage had already been done. There were fingerprints spanning three decades, from fingers crossing several generations—more than a few of them mine—and, from what I could tell, at least one paw print. They were like muddy footprints, roaming in every direction, crisscrossing, and sometimes getting into kicking brawls.

But surprisingly, there were no scratches. None that were visible anyway. If I took it out to the back lawn, gave it a prison bath with a garden hose, it would be as good as new. Of course, I wasn't going to do that. Those fingerprints were precious. There was a lot of history on one piece of synthetic plastic.

I knew this was my record. There wasn't a doubt in my mind. I didn't need to send it to a forensics lab, get the fingerprints analyzed. It had come from the crawl space in the home of Mike C.'s mother,
who lived just a block away. It's been in there, fermenting, with all the other records that circulated around the neighborhood during those early years.

They're all here, splayed out on the very same kitchen table of my youth, in the same kitchen I haven't set foot in since I was just getting comfortable with the idea of having pubic hair.

I still hadn't decided if this was awesome or just really, really confusing.

There was more undeniable proof that this was indeed the same K-Tel's
Night Flight
I'd bought in 1982 at a Meijer in Traverse City, about thirty miles away from this kitchen: it had no sleeve. It was sleeveless! Not even a white inner sleeve. Which is exactly as I'd left it.

I'd bought the record first and foremost for “The Theme from
The Greatest American Hero
(Believe It or Not).” Side two, track one. By Joey Scarbury. I don't know if I actually would have liked the song if it wasn't for
The Greatest American Hero
, which at the time was my favorite thing on TV. The best thing to happen to television since Lee Majors got bionics.

At first, I only listened to the Scarbury song. Over and over and over again. It was my anthem. But sometimes, I wasn't so quick to scramble back to the record player when the “believe it or nots” started to fade away. I just let it keep playing. And I ended up getting an introduction to Al Jarreau and the Four Tops and Quincy Jones.

The exact opposite of every type of music I'd been programmed to love. But there was a sort of Stockholm syndrome that developed from hearing those songs so many times by circumstance. I've got a punk-rock heart, but I know all the lyrics to Juice Newton's “Angel of the Morning,” and I can and will sing it loudly and passionately if the melody happens to drift into my ears.

Like all the records in our neighborhood, it became part of the communal lending library. It was everybody's property. My brother,
or Mike, or any kids who had access to our home (which was never locked) could just come in and help themselves to our collection. And return the borrowed records, well, maybe never. A record could get passed on to another kid, and another kid, until you lost all track of who had it. Maybe you'd get it back in the rotation eventually, but that was always fleeting. Because you never knew when somebody was going to be like, “Ah, yeah, the
Greatest American Hero
song! I'm gonna borrow this for a few days, 'kay?”

So I got rid of the sleeve. It was too recognizable, with
Night Flight
in a 3-D silver font, like it was being shot at you with lasers. I ripped it up, threw it away. And then I hid the record in other, less desirable record sleeves. I bought a Lawrence Welk record,
Music for Polka Lovers
, at a yard sale, specifically to use as a disguise. I threw out the polka record and hid the
Night Flight
record inside.

They found it. Like they always did. No matter where I hid it, they found it. I had to chase it through the neighborhood, until I finally gave up or lost interest in
The Greatest American Hero
, whichever came first. (Probably the latter.)

Our neighborhood communal record lending library wasn't chaos. There were rules, which every member followed and respected. They were never written down, or explicitly stated out loud, but we all understood them. If my memory is to be believed, they were as follows:

Rule #1. Take as Many Records as You Can Haul Away, but Be Cool About It

This was not like the local library, where you were compelled to check out only as many books as you reasonably expected to read. If you could carry them out of the house without assistance, they were yours (at least temporarily).

When it came to records, it wasn't always the quality that mattered but the quantity. If you'd had a shitty week at school, or your
parents were being asshats, or that girl you were briefly convinced might be the love of your life had made unnecessarily public proclamations that she found you repugnant, sometimes the only thing that would make it better was sitting alone in a dark bedroom and listening to every Lou Reed album sequentially. Or not. Maybe you just wanted to listen to
Transformer
over and over again, while looking at that creepy-ass cover—what was up with the Nosferatu whiteface?—and feeling sorry for yourself while bobbing your head along to romantic songs about urban blight that couldn't have had less to do with growing up in a town with the population of about six hundred, where the main export was cherries.

The point is, you took the records you thought you might need, not the records you knew you'd need.

If, however, you came to a person's home with a bag or suitcase, you were clearly being a greedy fuck, and possibly a thief. You took what you could carry, and nothing more. Ideally, you carried the records out of the previous owner's house like you were shoplifting—the goods perched between an arm and your side ribs, your hands casually hooked into your pockets, so it almost didn't appear like you were leaving with anything.

The trick was to act like you were stealing, despite the fact that you weren't stealing. You were taking what was legally yours to take, but you didn't want to be too obvious about it.

Rule #2. There Are No Firm Return Dates

Again, this wasn't a library. Nobody was stamping the record with a due date. There were no borrowing periods or return policies. The record or records stayed in your possession for as long as you needed them, or until somebody noticed that you had them and claimed them for himself.

That said, no attempts could be made to conceal your ownership
of a record. It could not be hidden from view, either in a closet or under a bed, or anywhere you might otherwise keep pornographic contraband from discovery by your parents. If the record in question had a cover that could feasibly get you into trouble—like Black Sabbath's
Born Again
, with the devil baby, or Black Flag's
Family Man
, with the suicidal dad, or
Sticky Fingers
, with the obvious gigantic cock—it was acceptable to hide the record, as long as the other members of your loaning community were aware of this arrangement (e.g., “My mom still hasn't found that Dead Kennedys record, thank god”).

Rule #3. Possession of Record Immediately Negates All Expectations of Reasonable Privacy

By taking a record home, you made yourself and your property, or your parents' property, entirely accessible to the entire record-sharing community. If, for instance, one of your peers decided that he really, really needed to hear that ABBA record
Super Trouper
, and he was well aware that it was in your bedroom, he could, without written or verbal consent, walk into your house, at any hour, and claim it.

This, in theory, was a fine idea. Unless you happened to be engaged in a private matter, involving you and . . . well, just you. There would be no warning knock. The door would simply swing open, and while you struggled to cover yourself and the intimate act you were in the middle of performing on yourself, your friend would simply stride in, pick up the ABBA record in question, and say, “Sorry, man. I've had ‘The Winner Takes It All' in my head all day, and I had to hear it. Catch you later!”

It happened. And all you could do was pretend not to be mortified. If you wanted total autonomy over your possessions, you shouldn't have entered into a communal-living, hippie co-op, vinyl-sharing situation.

Rule #4. You Cannot Claim Sole Ownership of a Record, or Claim Political Asylum for an Album

Records were owned by the community, not by the individual. Suddenly deciding “I'm going to hang on to this for a while,” or worse, insisting that it now belonged to you exclusively, was unacceptable and egregious, and would result in swift punishment and immediate excommunication from the record-sharing community.

Even if you personally paid for, say,
The Harder They Come
soundtrack or Springsteen's
Born to Run
, you didn't own it anymore. It was part of the collective. It belonged to everybody now. If you loved a record, then you had to set it free. You'd get to hear it again. It just didn't live with you anymore. It was a train hobo, and it traveled from town to town, only staying as long as it needed to, before jumping on the next boxcar, on its way to wherever. You can't domesticate a train hobo. You can't ask him to hang up his bindle and settle down for a life in one bedroom. What were you even thinking? Let it go, man. Let it go.

Rule #5. All Items Left in a Record Become the Property of the New Owner

Let's say, hypothetically, that you acquired (i.e., stole) a single card from a deck of nude playing cards—each featuring a different topless model—from the older brother of one of your peers. You stole this particular card because the woman on the back was breathtakingly beautiful, with breasts that you—okay fine, I—literally couldn't stop thinking about. Everything about them: the size, the areolas, the nipples. I mean seriously, those nipples. What was even happening with those nipples? They were each as big as my little toe, and looked like they had their own unique personalities. It was insane! I remember everything about her—she was brunette, she smiled without showing her teeth, and she represented the eight of clubs. As an adult, every
time I play cards with somebody, and the eight of clubs comes up, I still think of those aesthetically exquisite nipples.

But I left her in a record. I remember the exact one. Because I left it there as part of an imagined game of cat and mouse with my parents. Like they cared. Like the moment I left the house, they were scouring every inch of my bedroom for nude paraphernalia. But I overthought it, went too deep into the psychology of where my parents would expect to uncover pseudo-porn. I imagined my dad throwing a record against a wall in frustration, shouting, “Dammit, I was sure it'd be in Blondie's
Parallel Lines
!”

If he'd just thought about it more analytically, he would have figured it out. Blondie? Like I'd be that stupid! Obviously, I hid it in Bob Dylan's
Blood on the Tracks
. Because that naked playing card wasn't about sex. It was about yearning. That's what my father had missed. It wasn't just the nipples. It was what the nipples, and the rest of her, represented. She was an idea of femininity that felt achingly unattainable to me. When I looked at that playing card, the lyric in my head wasn't “I'm gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya.” It was Dylan singing, “I'm going out of my mind / With a pain that stops and starts / Like a corkscrew to my heart.”

But just because your parents don't find it doesn't mean somebody else won't. Like the next person who gets that copy of
Blood on the Tracks
. You don't realize it till it's gone, and by the time you catch up with the record, that nude playing card is long gone. And nobody's saying anything. “I didn't see any card,” they'll tell you with exaggerated shrugs. You have no legal recourse. You left it there. Finders keepers. The same law that protects a previous owner from all culpability if a record sleeve should happen to contain pubes or an old Band-Aid also protects the new owner from liability if he's accused of absconding with whatever treasures are discovered in said album sleeve while in his possession.

The law is the law.

“You might want to be careful with it,” Mike C. told me, pointing to the
Night Flight
I was gripping a bit too intensely. “It may have a little hantavirus on it.”

I looked up from the record at Mike. I was still amazed to see him—not just in this kitchen, but at all. I hadn't set eyes on him since puberty. Now here he was in his forties, with a goatee, nicotine-stained fingers, and a smoky baritone voice. It was surreal.

“Are you serious?” I asked.

“No, I'm kidding,” he said. “But it probably does though. When we pulled it out of the crawl space, it had a lot of dust on it, and what looked like rat feces.”

I took a quick whiff of one of my hands. Yep, that was rat poop all right. Ah well, there are worse ways to die.

“We might be out of luck, boys.” Mike pulled the record player's plug from yet another outlet. “Either this thing doesn't work anymore, or somebody turned off the power.”

I tried to mask my concern, but I was a little freaked out. I hadn't brought a backup. I'd left the Crosley at home. Bob had scared me straight with all his talk of “the right record player,” and how you needed to listen to those old records on something cheap and plastic, like we did when we were younger. So I went searching for something that looked like the record player that had been in my family for the first two decades of my life—the sole record player we could afford, and one that was shared with everybody. I studied photos on eBay and tried to find something that looked even vaguely familiar.