Old Records Never Die (29 page)

“Are you thinking of somebody else?” I asked him.

“No, no, you had drums in here, I'm sure of it,” he insisted.

“I really didn't.”

“You absolutely did! Don't tell me you didn't have drums.”

“I didn't have drums.”

“Come on! I remember you were always beating us up, roughing
up the younger kids. And then you'd come back here and start drumming. It always sounded like ‘Moby Dick' coming from your room.”

Nothing about this was accurate.

It was curious hearing John's many misconceptions about me, especially given all of my misconceptions about him. As we listened to records and talked, the details of his criminal history eventually came out. His crimes were directly related to his addictions, which involved obsessive playing of video games like
Ms. Pac-Man
,
Asteroids
, and
Pole Position
.

“I remember sneaking into the bars,” John told us. “And finally my mom would come in and pull me by my hair and say, ‘You are not supposed to be in here!'”

To pay for his habit, he broke into a Laundromat in search of quarters. “I was maybe ten years old,” he said. “Teddy B. and I, we hit the same Laundromat three times. That's how we got busted.”

“You got arrested for stealing quarters to play
Ms. Pac-Man
?” I asked.

“I'd do all sorts of crazy shit to get my arcade money. Remember when there was a pizzeria downtown, in the Pier 1 building? They used to keep stacks and stacks of soda. And the place was run by teenagers who'd always be in the back, goofing off. So, Teddy and I would walk in and take off with six or seven cases of pop. We were just pouring the pop into the lake. We couldn't drink it all, but we needed the empty cans to get the recycling deposit.”

I'd paid too much credence to the whispered warnings from our parents. I imagined switchblades and bathtubs full of heroin and cash stuffed into tube socks, not a ten-year-old emptying stolen soda into Lake Michigan so he could play
Asteroids
.

We played more music, and more secrets started to spill out. We listened to the Smiths'
Meat Is Murder
, and John told us about his divorce, and then his second divorce, and how he's been drunk and
depressed for a few years, but now he was doing much better and had a great relationship with his thirteen-year-old twin daughters. We listened to
Led Zeppelin III
, and Mike told us about how he'd been a professional carpenter for a few years, but then he'd been involved in a major accident in which he almost died—he showed us the scars to prove it—and now he's focusing on photography, which is what he really wants to do with his life. And then we talked about how we used to listen to the Smiths and Led Zeppelin without ever noticing that they existed in starkly different fictional sexual universes. On one side you had “My dick is like a gladiator sword,” and on the other it was, “But no one will ever love me!” It was a miracle these records didn't make us bipolar.

We listened to the
Star Wars
soundtrack, which as always immediately got less interesting after the first three minutes. But then Amy, Mark's wife, made us listen to “Attack of the Sand People” because she'd done a
Star Wars
–themed dance recital when she was seven and this was her song.

“I was a dancing Tusken Raider,” she said. “I had shredded fringes on my arms, and a costume with lots of bandages.”

“How does a Sand Person dance?” I asked.

“There was a lot of sashaying.”

We asked her for an impromptu “Attack of the Sand People” dance recital. She agreed, and it was one of the greatest things I've ever seen another human being do. There was much laughing and applauding.

At some point, I passed KISS
Alive II
—the double LP that had cost me three hundred dollars—over to Mark. “This look familiar?” I asked.

He looked at it blankly. “Yeah,” he said.

“See that handwriting in the corner?” I said, pointing toward the smudge over the
K
. “Ringing any bells?”

“Nope.”

“Well then, let's give it a listen and see if it does anything for you,” I said, letting one of the black disks slide out of the gatefold into my hand. I flipped it around with my fingers, twisting it like a magician doing a card trick, and let it slide weightlessly onto the turntable.

I'd been practicing for that moment. I'd rehearsed it a few times. This was a big deal. It was my chance to share something with Mark, something that we'd lost, that I'd found and brought back to us. It wasn't just an old record. There was something in these grooves—these specific grooves—that was part of who we were. And by playing it again, I don't know . . . something would happen.

The ways in which we'd drifted apart, the years that had turned us into different people, without any common ground, that wouldn't matter anymore. That distance between us would just disappear. In just a few songs, everything would change, and we'd be back to the way we were, when we weren't strangers, when he was my pain-in-the-ass little brother who lived across the hall from me, and I knew everything about him.

“Holy crap, is that ABBA?”

I had barely dropped the needle when he'd stopped paying attention altogether and moved on to something else.

Mark had uncovered ABBA's
Greatest Hits
. Not the more well-known
Gold
, from 1992. The 1976
Greatest Hits
from Atlantic. With the cover art of both couples sitting on park benches, Benny and Frida making out like horny teenagers, and Björn and Agnetha trapped in a loveless marriage (and yes, I seriously remember their names).

“We have to listen to this,” Mark insisted.

There was no point in arguing. I put on the record, and as it played, we passed around the sleeve so everybody could offer their analysis.

“What's remarkable is that the band didn't fall apart,” John remarked. “They clearly hate each other, but they're like, ‘We can't break up ABBA.'”

“They're professionals,” Mike offered.

“They're running a business,” Mark said.

“But they're honest,” Mike added. “So their honesty comes through in their art.”

We were as full of shit in our forties as we were in our preteens.

The music didn't do anything for me. But the album cover, that was a different matter. When it was passed to me, I looked at it and felt an instant calm wash over me. Our parents never got divorced, but they'd come close. There were arguments, and whispered threats, and that constant anxiety that hung in the air that everything was falling apart, and you were never really sure if it was happening or if it was all in your imagination. After overhearing things I wasn't supposed to overhear, I'd come up to my bedroom and look at the ABBA
Greatest Hits
album and feel a little more normal.

“This is ours,” Mark proclaimed, somewhere around the middle of “Ring Ring.”

“Totally,” John agreed.

“No, I mean this record. This one. This one here.” He held up the gatefold and shook it for emphasis.

“There's a good chance,” John said.

“I'm convinced of it! I'm convinced!”

“I'm agreeing with you.”

Mark turned to the rest of us, daring us with his eyes to challenge him. “This is it,” he said.

It was enough. It wasn't the KISS epiphany I'd been hoping for, but it was enough. To see Mark get so passionate, so vehemently certain that he'd found a record from our past. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Like John said, there was a good chance, since it'd come
from the crawl space/rat lavatory just a block away. Hearing the songs on that specific record, from the crappy speakers of a crappy GE record player exactly like the one we'd grown up with, had set off a chain reaction in his brain. It awakened something in him. And suddenly the guy who thought this whole thing was insane, who never really understood why I'd want to listen to old records in an empty house, was ready to get into a fistfight with anybody who didn't believe he was hearing something authentic.

We kept listening to records for at least another few hours. Some of it I hated; some of it I loved. Sometimes I wasn't even listening. It was enough just to be in the same room with these people, with the records as our anchor. There were no earth-shattering moments. There were just a lot of stories, and a few crazy theories. Like Mike's insistence that there was an exposed nipple on the inner sleeve of
The Magic of ABBA
. He showed it to us, explained how Agnetha's nipple was on full display if we just looked closely enough.

“Don't question me on this,” Mike said. “I've studied it from every possible angle. I spent almost my entire childhood looking at it. That's a nipple.”

“It's way too high on her chest to be a nipple,” Mark protested. “Unless you think it's a superfluous nipple.”

“That's a nip. Dude! Dude! That's exactly where a nipple would be.”

“No, no, no,” I shouted back at him. “You know nothing about nipple placement!” I lifted up my shirt, showing him where nipples should be. “A nipple is down here.”

“That doesn't count,” Mike scoffed. “You're a guy.”

“Amy, will you back me up on this?” I handed her the record. “There's no way that's a nipple, right?”

“That could be a nipple.” Amy laughed.

Something about this felt familiar. Not the specific topics of
conversation—although it was hardly the first (and maybe not the last) time this gathering of people would be discussing nipples. No, what was familiar was the tenor of our laughter. The way it all felt so natural, and so unforced. The ease of it reminded me of what I missed so much about smoking cigarettes. It's not the nicotine necessarily. What I really miss is the community that comes with smoking. The gathering of outcasts looking for a shared safe place for a cigarette, and you're there with people you know, or just as likely people you've just met, and you start talking to them, because what the hell else are you going to do, other than stare at the burning ember. Over the span of that cigarette, you learn things about them that you don't take the time to learn with anyone else. Smokers have a bond that nonsmokers could never understand. It's why, to this day, when I'm out driving and I see a bunch of smokers huddled outside a building, puffing away in the cold and laughing at some private joke, I look at them and think, “Those are my people.” Even if I never touch another cigarette for the rest of my life, those will always be my people.

This was it. This was that feeling again. We'd created a little bubble of intimacy, something larger than just family or old friendships. It'd be done the moment the record was over. But right here, right now, these were my people.

I
lay on the floor, because there was no place else to sit.

The chairs and the table had been taken away, carted off by my mom and her husband like they were stagehands. John and Mike had left too, and taken with them a trash bag full of the afternoon's props—the crushed beer cans and empty wine bottles and surprisingly foraged box of Boo Berry. We'd taken down the posters up in the otherwise empty bedrooms, even chipped away the Scotch tape remnants with our fingernails, and made sure we'd removed every last piece of evidence that we'd been here.

The only thing they left were the records. Everything Mike had dug out of his mom's crawl space, and the records John had found in his basement, they told me to keep it all.

“We'll get it back the next time we see you,” they said.

Those were 1978 rules. It was a system that worked much better when we all lived a few blocks away from each other. It would prove to be a little more difficult to orchestrate a vinyl lending library when all the members lived in different states. But I didn't protest. I thanked them for their generosity, and promised to take good care
of their records until I returned them, which we both knew wouldn't be happening. We'd had our fun with this trip down memory lane, but if I didn't call dibs on these musty records, they'd be going straight back to being rat urinals.

When everybody had gone, it was just me and the records and the beige GE record player, which was now hot to the touch from almost six hours of constant use (clearly not something it was designed for). I took everything into the living room and made a little campsite, spread out the records like they were rose petals on a honeymoon suite bed. And then just let my limbs flail.

I reached out blindly, grabbing the first record I could get my fingers around, and pulled it up to my face.

Paul's Boutique
. Okay then, let's do some Beasties.

I put the needle down on “Shake Your Rump.” Because that's the song I needed to hear. It reminded me of one of my favorite formative experiences as a music listener: not having the faintest idea what the lyrics in a song were, and yet singing along anyway.

Like a pen I'm pimpin', Lab-ra-dor eatin' shrimp in

Well you bustin' my bank, you're pissin' for a living

No?

I remembered when Adam Yauch died, and it happened to fall on my mom's birthday. I called her, and she could tell I was sad, and when I explained why, she was even more confused.

“I didn't know you listened to rap,” she said.

“Well no, not all the time,” I told her. “But the Beastie Boys were different.”

“Because they're white?”

“No, no, no!” I barked a little too defensively. “They're from Brooklyn,” I reminded her, like that somehow canceled out their whiteness. “And they're Jewish.”

I don't know where I was going with that.

I rehashed every cliché I'd read in countless magazine and online obituaries and tributes. The Beasties represented a New York City that didn't exist anymore. A New York that, coincidentally, I never actually experienced firsthand. The closest I got to the eighties New York rap and hard-core scene was walking around Lincoln Mall in the south suburbs of Chicago listening to “Shake Your Rump” on a Walkman. I didn't feel stupid about this. My nostalgia for things that had nothing to do with me is pretty common. I'm not the only one who owns a CBGB T-shirt despite never having set foot in CBGB.

“They don't make records like that anymore,” I told my mom. Which isn't even an original observation. I'm sure every living person on the entire planet—all seven billion of them—has thought the same thing (or will when they reach a certain age). The only thing more common to the human experience than “they don't make records like that anymore” is “I don't want to die” and “I've never loved somebody as much as I loved (person they haven't seen naked in twenty years).”

I wasn't suggesting that music should sound exactly like it did in 1989. That would be insane. They don't make medicine or fingerless gloves like they did in 1989 either, and our world is better for it. When I said, “They don't make records like that anymore,” what I was really saying is “I'm not twenty like I was when I was twenty anymore.”

Thinking about Adam Yauch made me remember that I'm also going to die someday. Which isn't something I like to be reminded of. Yauch died when he was forty-seven, and I'm rapidly approaching that age. And Yauch took considerably better care of himself. He had a pretty nice BMI, an active lifestyle, and he was into meditation. Me, I spend a good deal of time sitting and drinking and feeling anxious.

I lay there and listened to my heartbeat, and wondered if the
heart attack I always knew was coming would happen now, while I was lying on this floor, listening to a Beastie Boys record. Is this how it'd end? Is this how they'd find me? I wonder if that would be comforting for my family—that I'd died surrounded by things I loved, rather than in some office under fluorescent lights, angry at how I'd gotten there. Or would Charlie obsess over it? Would he hold on to this
Pau
l's Boutique
and listen to it too many times, wondering what his dad had been thinking at the end, why these particular songs made his heart finally stop?

You think about these things. My dad died while eating an egg salad sandwich, and I've dissected that sandwich more times than I care to admit. It became a metaphor for loss. And an egg salad sandwich doesn't even come with lyrics! There are no lines to read between, no musical themes to deconstruct, to ponder what they meant in your father's final minutes. It's just an egg salad sandwich! If I died here, I'd be setting up my son for a lifetime of overanalyzing the Beastie Boys, trying to understand why he'd been robbed of his dad.

And then there's the funeral to consider. What music will they be playing? Given the circumstances, they'll probably choose from among the records I died with. And there are a lot of great choices here. The Replacements, Lou Reed, the Stooges, any of them would make for an amazing funeral soundtrack. But there were also a few Kenny Rogers records in there. And some ABBA. Jesus Christ, what if my mom put on ABBA? Well, of course she would. She'd take one look at the blood-splattered
Let It Be
, like something Jackson Pollock had painted with his own plasma, and say, “Oh no, we can't play this. We have guests coming from out of town. Let's pick something everybody can enjoy.” And that's how I'd leave this mortal coil rocking out to “Fernando.”

Side one of
Paul's Boutique
was over. The needle waited for me to do something, purring for attention. But I ignored it.

I closed my eyes and listened to the house. It was still vibrating. I could still hear the music echoing through the halls. My mom liked the carpeting. She thought it was an improvement. “So much warmer,” she said. Warmer? Maybe the temperature was warmer, but the character was gone. It was like people who thought a FLAC file was superior to an old vinyl forty-five that'd been gathering dust in the attic of a rarely visited record store. Only a fool would think this. Art is not more meaningful when it's shinier.

But the carpeting could only cover up so much. The floorboards still creaked if you listened hard enough. You could still hear echoes in the walls. You could hear music still pulsating through the house's old beams like a tuning fork. You could hear tiny footsteps running down the hall, giggles reverberating as someone small and fast runs closer and closer . . .

Wait, what?

My son burst into the room, jumped into the air like David Lee Roth being excited about Panama. His hair was long, messy, and blond, his clothes like something from a Brooklyn thrift store, and he smiled in the big, unironic way I'd forgotten how to do anymore. He was simultaneously the coolest person I knew and the happiest, which were two things I didn't realize could coexist so easily.

“Daddy,” he shouted, running over to me and doing a belly flop into my arms. “Are you still listening to records?”

“I am,” I told him, pulling him into a bear hug. “I'm glad you're here.”

“Everybody left?” Kelly asked, peeking into the room.

I knew they were coming. She told me they'd be driving up later, joining me after I did what I needed to do. But seeing her face, holding my son in my arms, it was still a relief. Like coming up for air in the ocean.

“They left a while ago,” I said. “Come on in, sit down, make yourself at home.”

She tiptoed inside, looking around like there was something to see besides empty walls and high ceilings. “This is bigger than I imagined,” she said.

“Well, there's no furniture,” I said. “Shove a couch in here and it's a little different.”

She brushed some records aside with her foot, clearing a spot, and sat down next to me. Charlie had already gotten up and was running around the room, leaping from record to record like he was hopping on rocks to cross a river.

“Charlie, don't, those are very special to Daddy,” Kelly said.

“No, it's okay,” I whispered to her. “Charlie, it's fine. If you see anything in there you want to listen to, let me know.”

I went looking through the pile nearest me, flipping through to find the perfect soundtrack for this reunion.

“It's okay, we don't need any music,” she said.

“Of course we need music,” I insisted. “Blondie? Kenny Rogers? Lady's choice.”

“Can you just leave it alone for a minute? You've been listening to music all day. How about we just have a quiet moment together?”

This was a long-standing disagreement between us. I felt that every room feels empty without music. I instinctively want to fill it with sound. But my wife likes music only occasionally, like when she wants to actively listen to it. She'll say things like, “Can we turn that down so we can finish this conversation without yelling?” Or “I can't hear myself think, can we please turn that off?” That's always seemed weird to me. I can't hear myself think without music.

“Talking Heads! That's what we need.”

I dropped the needle onto side two of
Remain in Light
, letting “Once in a Lifetime” put everything we were feeling into perfect context.

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife

And you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here?

Charlie started dancing, as he always does when we put on music. And he instinctively went into the David-Byrne-in-a-huge-suit moves. Despite never having seen the video, he just knew. He felt the rhythmic shrugging in his bones.

“So how did it go?” she asked.

I just smiled. “It went well,” I said.

Actually, it had gone considerably better than “well.” My ears were still ringing from the glorious racket of familiar melodies. My stomach was aching from laughing with my brother, harder than we ever had since prepubescence. I actually cried out of ecstatic joy. I didn't think that was possible. I cried like I guess people do at soul churches, when they're clutching Bibles and praising Jesus.

But I went with “well,” because explaining all of that would have taken too many adjectives, and would have sounded like hyperbole. Like so many of life's meaningful moments—the ones you still talk about years later and you feel amazed and grateful that they actually happened to you—you'll never be able to capture exactly what it felt like to be there.

“That's nice,” Kelly said, squeezing my hand. “So why do you still seem so sad?”

I pretended to be surprised. “I'm not sad,” I insisted.

“You look sad.”

“No, I'm just tired,” I said. “The day took it out of me.”

We lay on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. Somewhere upstairs, Charlie was exploring, his feet pitter-pattering across the floors like a mouse.

She was right, of course. Like she's usually right. I was sad.
Because there was a finality to this. Already the day was fading in my memory, becoming past tense. I'd have to leave the house eventually, take the records and the record player and leave the key on the kitchen floor, like I'd promised. And then tomorrow, another family would move in, and they'd bring all their stuff with them. They'd shove couches and mattresses into rooms, and put things on the walls that weren't KISS posters, and start acting like they owned the joint.

Kelly and Charlie and I, we'd drive back to Chicago in the morning. Back to an apartment that needed to be packed. Because we were moving soon too. I'd said yes to the
Men's Health
job. In another month, we'd be living in Pennsylvania. In a town called Macungie, which sounded like the medical name for a skin abscess. I'd be getting up every morning, putting on slacks and a tie and a sensible shirt with buttons, and I'd go to an office that paid me an adult salary. On my commute to work, I'd sing along to Harry Chapin's “Cat's in the Cradle” and try not to cry.

It would get easier with time. Of course it would. Eventually, what felt foreign and weird would just be the way our lives were now. And we'd have a house with a basement and a garage and a yard that Charlie could run in. That's not a bad trade for having to show up at an office and wear pants occasionally.

Life was changing. It was a good thing. A step forward. I just wasn't ready for it yet.

I wanted to stay here. Or keep looking for records. But it was over. I knew it. I was done. At the end of the line. There were no more record stores to scour. No more basements to dig through, or old friends to track down, or milk crates trapped in crawl spaces to be uncovered.

I mean sure, there were a few leads I hadn't explored. An old high school buddy who I'd exchanged records with (and also porn
mags) during our teens was now living in Hawaii, on a military base, with his wife and two teenage sons. There was a .00001 percent chance he still had my copy of
Exile on Main St.
, which I'd lent him in 1987 and never got back. But he was a born-again Christian and a devout Republican and gun advocate. I'm not sure I wanted to slog through that conversation in the off chance that maybe he'd let me go through the boxes in his garage.