Old Records Never Die (27 page)

I finally tracked it down. It wasn't a Fisher-Price or Tele-tone at all. It was a 1974 General Electric V638h three-speed automatic record player. I confirmed it with my brother, who responded in an e-mail with far more exclamation points than I've ever seen him use. Everything about it made our collective hearts beat a little faster—
the way it wasn't quite big enough to comfortably fit a normal-size LP, or how it folded into a beige suitcase, in case you wanted to bring your music to a picnic or a hootenanny, or the various knobs on the side, including one mysteriously labeled
REJ
, which neither my brother or I touched in eighteen years, just in case it did something terrible.

I paid twenty-five dollars for it on eBay. And I hadn't bothered to give it a test run before driving up here. What was the worst that could happen?

“I don't know, man,” John J. said, looking up from the KISS
Alive II
he'd been studying for the last ten minutes. “You sure this is ours?”

I was annoyed by his insistence on calling it “ours,” even though I was well aware that technically it was more his than anybody's. It had originated from him and eventually became community property, as all our records did, but in my memory, it was always in Mark's bedroom or mine. When Mark had written “HANDS OFF!!!” he was referring to me. Not everybody in our music-sharing community. Specifically me. I felt very territorial about this, and the issue was not open for discussion.

Also, holy shit, John J. was in our house.

Well, what used to be our house. But he was here, sitting right across from me. The last time he was between these walls, we were both preteens. He was wearing a Misfits T-shirt and combat boots, he already had a criminal record, and he asked if he could smoke a cigarette in my bedroom.

At forty, he wasn't all that different from how I imagined he'd be as an adult. He was wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt and combat boots, he was divorced with kids, and he showed up with a six-pack of beer. He was also completely gray, and from what I gathered during our brief conversation thus far, he worked for a slot machine company.

I leaned over the table and pointed to the inky smudge on the KISS
Alive II
cover. “Right there,” I said. “That's where my brother wrote on it.”

John wasn't convinced. “You sure?” he asked. “That's not really legible.”

“But that's where it was,” I insisted.

“Yeah. But it doesn't look like anything. How do you know it was Mark? Maybe somebody else wrote on it.”

“On that exact spot?”

“That's not possible?”

I huffed loudly. “I've been doing this for a while. I've seen a lot of KISS
Alive II
s. I haven't come across a single copy with writing over that specific spot on the K. You show me another KISS
Alive II
where somebody has written over the
K
, and I'll concede that maybe I'm not right about this.”

Oh fuck, I totally threw away three hundred dollars, didn't I?

“Got it!” Mike announced. The GE record player slowly whirred to life, creaky as an old carousel.

“Nice,” John said, raising a beer in salute. “What'd you do?”

“It wasn't on,” Mike said.

“So where do we start?” John asked, looking at the records in front of us.

I had no idea. And not because I wanted to hear it all. I did, of course. But that wasn't the difficult part. What we had in front of us, essentially, were a bunch of records that contained two perfectly separate worlds: music that represented who we wanted to be, and music that maybe represented what we kinda actually were.

On one side, we had Iggy Pop, and the Clash, and the New York Dolls, and the Replacements, and the Ramones, and the Dead Kennedys, and Devo, and Blondie, and Social Distortion, and Elvis Costello. On the other side, we had the Bangles, and Mr. Mister, and
Rick Springfield, and Gordon Lightfoot, and ABBA, and Captain & Tennille, and Kenny Rogers, and Barry Manilow, and a K-Tel collection featuring a song from a TV show about a clumsy superhero.

I loved all of it. But only some of it I'd admit to.

I looked down at the record in my hands, I'm holding the K-Tel so tightly, my thumbs are leaving little craters in the vinyl. I know what I want to hear. I want to hear the “Believe It or Not” song. I want to play that shit loud. Really belt out the “Should have been somebody eeeeeeelse” part, with a little bit of Zack de la Rocha venom. That would be pretty awesome right about now.

But the other part of me, the part that wanted to be cool, knew that it was a much better idea to say, “Let's play the fucking Misfits.” Because that's what you say to the cool guy in the combat boots who wants to smoke in your house. Because he's going to snarl-smile at you and say, “Fuck yeah!” And you'll feel cool by association.

“Let's play the fucking Misfits,” I said.

John snarl-smiled and saluted me with rock horns. “Fuck yeah.”

Told you.

Before John, there was no music. Oh sure, we had the occasional ABBA album. Or the Jim Croce or Fleetwood Mac records we borrowed from our parents' bedroom. But nothing that was uniquely ours. That made you feel like you were listening to something that could change your DNA in some fundamental way.

Mike told the story again, about how he'd gone over to John's house to play his Atari 2600, because he was the only kid in the entire state (as far as we knew) who owned an Atari 2600. Mike noticed the KISS
Alive II
album on John's bedroom floor, and he was like, “Cool bloody guy,” about the photo of Gene Simmons drooling blood in the rain. John insisted that Mike borrow and listen to the record, although Mike had no interest. But he pretended to like KISS, so John would continue to let him use his Atari 2600.

“You wanted to play the Atari games, you had to pretend to like KISS,” Mike said.

“That's true,” John said. “That was part of the deal.”

Mike dropped the needle on the Misfits'
Beware
EP. And almost immediately, I wanted it to stop. Not just that, I wanted to take the record out into the backyard and bury it. Make sure it couldn't find us anymore. Because Glenn Danzig, holy crap, what was he going on about? I understood about as much as I did when I first heard it in the early eighties, and the most I could figure out is that all of Danzig's mirrors are black, and he really, really wanted to stab me. I wasn't comfortable with any of this information.

When John first loaned this record to me, when I was barely thirteen, I listened to the entire thing in one sitting, and decided it was the single most terrifying thing I'd ever heard. I took it down to the basement in our house and left it there. I knew I couldn't throw it out, because John would be wanting it back at some point. But I didn't want it near me. I sure as hell didn't want it in the same room where I slept. Just having the physical object that contained these songs anywhere near my sleeping body seemed like a terrible idea.

“There was this record player in first grade,” John said, nodding his head along to the music. “And Mike and your brother used to bring in ABBA. Which the teacher thought was pretty terrific.”

“She was into it,” Mike agreed.

“But then I brought in my sister's Ted Nugent
Double Live Gonzo!
and played it. And that is not a good record for school. He started dropping the f-bomb. And the teacher just went off.”

“I think she wasn't a fan of ‘Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.'” Mike laughed.

“Yeah, my mom got a call on that one. I had no idea. I just brought it in 'cause it looked cool. The album looked cool.”

The more we talked, I almost forgot that the Misfits were scary.
They became a perfect soundtrack to talking about how John became our musical black sheep, the perfect fall guy for our every attempt to dip our toe in unfamiliar water. Every time we got caught with something we shouldn't have—a record with profanity, some
Mad
magazines, a deck of playing cards with nude women on the backs—it was always easier to blame John than take accountability. He already had a bad reputation, it's not like we were smearing his good name. It was like pinning another murder on a serial killer with an already double-digit body count.

“So are we going to eat some Boo Berry or what?” John said, leaping out of his seat and toward the refrigerator.

My stomach lurched. I'd been planning on this all along, but now that it was actually happening, I was having second thoughts.

“It's got high fructose corn syrup,” Mike said, reading the box's label.

“This is good for you, dude,” John said, sliding a finger under the cardboard top and slowly breaking open the seal. “It's probably better for you than the cereal they make today. There was nothing genetically modified back then.”

“I'm feeling nervous about this,” I admitted.

“Don't be silly,” John scoffed. “If you had a bottle of wine from 1978, wouldn't you drink it?”

“Well . . .”

“Of course you'd drink it.”

He tilted the box toward a chipped Pottery Barn blue bowl, and the little blue clumps, like cerulean rat turds, tumbled out, hitting the porcelain with a surprisingly metallic thud. It sounded like pennies dumped into an aluminum trash can.

We stared as John poured two more identical bowls, and then passed the carton of milk, which he'd purchased just a few hours earlier from a gas station.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. I could feel the microscopic particles hit my nostrils, little jagged asteroids of crystal happiness. I recognized it like I recognized the Old Spice cologne on my dad's old ties. It brought me back to when we were nine years old, and Boo Berry was our crystal meth. Our heroin chic.

I remember once, Mark and Mike and I went camping. Not in the forest just a half mile from our home. In the backyard. It felt like a bold step toward manhood and independence. Among our supplies, we brought a box of Boo Berry, and ate the entire thing in one sitting. We didn't even need milk, we just passed it around and ate handfuls dry, straight from the box. Our little bodies weren't accustomed to sugar—our moms didn't even allow us to drink soda except on special occasions—so we went a touch crazy. Our eyes got as big as saucers, and our heartbeats pounded like a drum circle. We talked without pauses, excited about everything and laughing hysterically at the slightest hint of humor.

At some point, and this may've been the sugar talking, somebody had the bright idea that we should go streaking. Being particularly suggestible, our brains stained as blue as our tongues, we immediately ripped off our clothes and went running through the forest, howling at the moon like we were something to be feared. We felt huge and indestructible.

The next day, Mike got a call from the elderly widow who lived down the block. I don't even remember her name anymore. I don't think I ever exchanged more than a nod with her. She was the house everyone avoided on Halloween just out of instinct. Even from a distance, it smelled like rheumatism ointment. So Mike was understandably rattled even before she explained the reason for her call. She told him that she'd seen us last night. Not when we were gorging on Boo Berry. The other part. Apparently the darkness hadn't shaded our nudity quite as well as we'd hoped. Mike tried to
apologize, but she assured him that we had nothing to worry about. She had no intention of telling our parents. In fact, if we ever decided to go streaking again, she welcomed us to do so a little closer to her house, maybe even in the backyard, where we'd have more privacy.

“It'd be our secret,” she told him.

I poured milk into my bowl and submerged a spoon. I had to do this. This was communion. One little bite wouldn't kill me, right?

It tasted . . . dusty.

We sat quietly and crunched. Somebody had put on a Stooges record, and Iggy was bemoaning how “There's nothing in my dreams / Just some ugly memories,” which seemed like an entirely appropriate serenade for this late afternoon brunch.

“Isn't your brother coming?” John asked, his jaw moving in odd ways, like he was trying to swallow a tiny squirrel that wanted very much to escape.

“Yeah, he'll be here,” I said, swallowing hard, trying not to think about what I was ingesting. The distraction of eating thirty-six-year-old cereal made it easier to conceal my disappointment about my brother. I was pretty sure Mark wouldn't be showing up.

“It's like a blueberry White Russian,” John said, now on his third spoonful.

“It tastes exactly the same,” Mike said, his teeth already bright blue.

“No, no, it tastes better,” John said. “I feel like it's making me stronger.”

Maybe my brother wasn't coming because he already knew something that hadn't sunk in for me until I had a mouthful of mealy cereal. I was a fool. This wasn't harmless nostalgia. I was an old man spinning his wheels. Quite suddenly, I was acutely aware that everything I'd done over the past year had been a colossal waste of time.

“What are you trying to accomplish?” Mark had yelled at me just a few hours earlier. “What's the end goal here?”

I had no fucking clue. All I really had to show for it was some bloody cuticles and a bunch of antiques, some of which I might have owned when I was a teenager. It's a fucking miracle that I found any of it. But so what? How was I not just chasing shadows, or worse, a dog chasing its tail? A mangy, chewed-up tail that wouldn't be all that satisfying even if he ever managed to catch it.

I wanted to burst into tears, but I was pretty sure it'd just come out a sugary dark blue.

“This is good,” John said, looking down at his bowl. “I really needed this.”

“Old cereal?” Mike asked.

“No, the whole thing. The records, being in this house, hanging out with you guys again. It's been a rough couple of days.”