The Vinyl Princess (17 page)

I
t’s part of my routine now to skateboard by the falafel place on my way to work. I can’t really say why. Maybe it’s my way of whistling past the graveyard, or maybe I’m likening it to my own life, with its boarded-up front and yellow crime-scene tape and blood on the floor.

On Monday, though, it’s all different. I stand across the street next to my board and watch two men carefully hoist a new window into place, replacing the broken one. The front door is propped open and the tables and chairs from inside are piled onto the sidewalk patio. A man in white overalls with a do-rag tied over his hair rolls fresh paint onto the walls inside. There’s a paint-spattered tarp covering the floor but I’m willing to bet that there’s not a drop of blood left on that floor underneath it. I don’t see Sanje anywhere, but there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s behind all this. He’s moving on, starting over. I think about that Tom Waits song “New Coat of Paint,” where he sings, “All your scribbled lovedreams are lost or thrown away,” and then I kick off on my board and glide around the corner to Bob’s.

My dad got back to me last night at about eleven just as I was brushing my teeth. I told him to hang on a second while I rinsed. My dad’s joining a band is need-to-know information.

The band is called Hong Kong High. They needed a new drummer because theirs just went into rehab. He’s twenty-one. They auditioned a lot of kids but none of them was as good as my dad, so they hired him. The average age of the band members is twenty-three, but with my dad on board it’s up to twenty-eight. I asked him if he thought he might be a little old for this stuff and he said, “Al, you’re acting like I’m
old
old. Do you have any idea how old Jimmy Page and Robert Plant are?” I guess he’s got a point there. I asked him which bands influence Hong Kong High and he said they told him but he wasn’t familiar with any of them. He mentioned Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance and AFI, bands my dad would never listen to, but it’s only a matter of time before he gets hold of that particular steering wheel and takes over the driving. He can be very charismatic when he wants something.

This morning, my blog was packed with posted comments about sound tracks on LP. I’m no longer the sole blogger on my blog. I’ve become a moderator. I give the participants a topic and shout, “Go!” and they’re off. Remy from Antwerp usually checks in first, and then Thor from Norway, and then Tex from New York, and Susan from Austin, and Norman from New Hampshire, and Sula from Iceland and on and on. Don’t these people ever sleep? Oh, and they don’t always talk to just me anymore; they talk to one another. Plus, I found out yesterday that my blog got linked to a lot of other blogs without my even doing anything, so I got a whole bunch of readers from other music blogs. It’s totally crazy. Still nothing from my “Fan” in Berkeley.

I was in a sentimental mood when I chose today’s LP to blog about; maybe it was because my dad joined a band, but I got to thinking about when we all lived in the house together, so I blogged about Simon and Garfunkel’s
Bookends
. This is my favorite Simon and Garfunkel album. It was a staple in our house when I was a kid (I especially loved “At the Zoo”). I usually like to listen to this LP in the fall because all the songs seem to be about the seasons changing or winter approaching or the end of something. Summer’s almost over and a lot of things have been changing around here lately, so it seemed appropriate.

Shortly after I open the store and Laz and I take up our respective positions at the front counter, a scrawny kid I’ve never seen before sets off the security alarm next to the checkout, which means he’s either been shoplifting or he has a steel plate in his head. Judging by the size of him (he’s about twice as big as when he arrived thirty minutes ago), he’s got a lot of product stashed under his oversize clothes. Considering how slowly Laz moves the rest of the time—sort of reminiscent of a record store gargoyle—it’s hard not to be impressed by his agility during shoplifting incidents. He utilizes a two-part maneuver: The first part involves him swinging his leg out in front of the retreating shoplifter and catching him just at the front of his shins. The shoplifter goes down hard, dislodging the stolen product, which comes clattering to the floor around him. In part two of the maneuver, Laz straddles the kid, pulling his right arm behind him, immobilizing him. I pick up the product from around him and stack it into a neat pile next to the cash register.

“Hey, you’re breaking my arm!”

Laz ignores that. “Okay, kid, you’re not in Wal-Mart anymore. Here’s how it works at Bob’s. You unload anything else you might have in your clothes and we tally up everything you’ve ripped off and then you pay for it. The only catch is that you don’t get the merchandise; we do. After that, my assistant here takes your photo and we add it to ‘Bob’s Book of Banned Butt-heads.’ The
butt-head
part refers to anyone stupid enough to try to rip off Bob’s. Once you appear in this book, you are never to set foot in this store again. Do you understand?”

“What if I don’t have any money?”

“Good question,” says Laz. “Allie, what if he doesn’t have any money?”

I stand next to him, my foot next to his hand. “In that case, you’re allowed a choice. We call the cops or we call your parents. Up to you.”

The kid groans.

“Okay, I’m going to help you to your feet and then you’re going to give me everything else you have. I should warn you that if you try to run at this point, I will give chase and I will catch you, and when I do I’ll kick your ass into next Tuesday. Got it?”

The kid nods. He pulls three more CDs out of his clothes and I ring everything up. The total comes to ninety-three dollars and twenty-seven cents. The kid opens his wallet and pulls out a hundred-dollar bill. I give him his change and he starts to leave, cursing and shaking his head.

“Not so fast.” Laz grabs him and yanks him back in front of me. I pull out the Polaroid camera from the drawer where we keep it for these occasions and snap a photo.

“And now you can go. Thank you for shopping at Bob and Bob Records,” says Laz.

The kid can’t leave fast enough. I watch his picture come into focus. He looks like a junior version of the men in the mug shots at the police station.

After the shoplifting incident, Laz and I go back to our separate ends of the counter like it never happened.

A geek in a cheap suit walks into the store late in the afternoon, asking for Bob. I fetch him from the office and he comes out and shakes the guy’s hand a bit like you might shake the hand of the undertaker who’s about to embalm your grandmother. The two of them disappear back into the office with the door locked for the better part of an hour. After that they emerge from the office and walk around the store, stopping to look at product here and there. Laz and I wildly speculate on who the guy could be but we purposely don’t come close to naming our biggest fear. After the guy leaves without so much as a glance in our direction, I casually ask Bob about him.

“Oh, he’s nobody, just a guy with an idea, you know . . .” he answers evasively.

I spin around and lock eyes with Laz, who shrugs.

When I get home, my mom and Ravi are sitting at the table working. Is it my imagination or is my mom sitting a lot closer to Ravi than she usually does?

“Hi, Ravi. How are you?” I ask.

“Very good, Miss Allie, how are you?”

“I’m pretty good. Hey, how long have you been swimming at Anza?” I ask him. My mom is giving me her warning look and shaking her head.

“Every day now for years. Why, have you seen me there?”

“We were there yesterday. You’re a really great swimmer.”

“Thank you. When you say you were there, do you mean both of you?” He looks at my mom and then at me. I let her answer that one.

“Yes . . . we, um, didn’t want to bother you. You looked so . . . focused.” She laughs nervously and runs her fingers through her freshly washed, ultrashiny hair. Ravi sees something in her eyes that he’s probably never seen before. He holds her gaze, saying nothing for as long as he dares.

I creep upstairs and leave them to their moment. My work is done.

I check my blog again. I’ve become obsessive. There’s a comment from my Fan in Berkeley. My pulse quickens. I quickly read it:

I comment back:

I stand in front of my wall of LPs and start composing the mix CD I’m about to make Zach that will blow his mind—that is, if I ever see him again. I pull out Aerosmith,
Toys in the Attic
; Jethro Tull,
Aqualung
;
Buffalo Springfield
; the Byrds,
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
; then I put them all back and start over with a Dusty Springfield album. I add Julie London. This could be my biggest musical challenge yet. When I’ve got a good-size stack going, my mom appears in my doorway.

“Hey, thanks for that. I could punch you.”

“What? You didn’t want Ravi to know that you were at the beach? What are you, like, twelve or something?”

“No. I just didn’t want him to think I was watching him.”

“Why not? ’Cause he was wearing a Speedo?”

“Of course not, but now that you mention it, it really isn’t much different from seeing someone in their underwear, is it?”

“Nope, and thanks for the visual.”

My mom does a pirouette in her flip-flops with her hands above her head and, for a second, she does look like a twelve-year-old. She’s wearing a flowered low-cut sundress and mascara—who is she trying to kid with that?

“We’re going out next week.”

“Who? You and Ravi?”

“Yes.” She sighs. “Me and Ravi.”

“Really? Where?”

“The Pharaoh Sanders concert at the Zellerbach, but we’re having dinner afterward.”

“Ravi . . . that dog.”

My mom laughs. “A date with Ravi. Wow, I sure didn’t see that coming. Am I horribly shallow because I wasn’t interested in the old Ravi?”

“Nah. How were you supposed to be attracted to the Ravi who always had crumbs in his beard and smelled like wet dog?”

“Ugh, that tweed jacket, remember that thing?”

“Who could forget?”

My mom flops onto my bed and watches me search through my LPs.

“What are you doing?”

“Brain surgery,” I answer, pulling out another LP, sighing, and putting it back.

“Have you talked to your dad?”

“Yeah. Last night. He joined a band.”

She sits up on her elbows. “What, like a real band?”

“What’s a real band?”

“One that gets paid.”

“Yeah. I think so. They’re called Hong Kong High. I looked them up online. They’re punk-ass kids. The stuff they do isn’t Dad’s stuff at all; it’s pretty ‘out there,’ but I think he needed something to do.”

My mom snorts. “He’ll never outgrow his adolescence. He’s living with a spoiled brat, starting a family with her, for God’s sake! And now he’s joined a band? He’s probably old enough to be their father!”

I shrug. Sometimes I wonder if she even remembers that he’s still
my
father. She talks about him like he’s an ex-employee that we had to let go because we caught him stealing office supplies and now we’re allowed to talk trash about him for eternity. I mean, technically, she did fire him but I can’t do that. We’re bonded for life. He’ll always be my dad, whether I like it or not.

My mom sits up and dangles her legs over the side of my bed. She looks down at her bare feet. “There isn’t any food in the house.”

“I know.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Starved.”

“Do you want to walk over to the island and get a burrito?”

“Sure.” The island isn’t actually the name of the place. It’s a tiny burrito joint with about four tables surrounded by three different streets, so we’ve always called it the island. We have no idea what the real name of the place is. They have picnic tables outside and you can sit there and watch the cars drive by on three sides while mariachi music plays on the outdoor speakers. There’s a certain charm to that.

My mom slides her feet back into her flip-flops and stands up. I leave my stack of LPs for later. As we stroll over to the island together, talking about boys along the way, I realize that I’ve spent more time with my mom this summer than I ever remember.

S
uki is moving out. She told my mom that she’s moving into the house where her boyfriend lives because one of his housemates moved out. First of all: boyfriend? I know Suki’s a ghost but how is it possible that my mom and I have never even laid eyes on this guy? Maybe he’s a ghost too, or maybe she’s lying. Maybe the real reason she’s leaving is the hair in the sink, the half-eaten cheese sandwiches on the side of the bathtub, the loud music at all hours and the kitchen fires. Let’s face it, my mom and I are not ideal roommates. In our defense, though, we’re new at the roommate game. If she had complained even once, we might have changed our behavior . . . maybe.

My mom puts up an ad at student housing again and the very next day, like
Groundhog Day
, another Suki arrives on our doorstep. Her name is Akiko and she’s Bizarro Suki. Akiko looks like a character from a Japanese comic book. Her hair is royal blue. She’s wearing striped socks that go up to her midthighs and a miniskirt. Her makeup is glam rock circa 1979 and she’s wearing platform shoes. She has an explosive laugh and she tells us she’s from Tokyo (duh, really?). We show her the room. Pierre is lying across Suki’s futon. He lifts his head and regards us as intruders. Akiko takes the room. She’ll move in in two weeks, right after Suki moves out. On the way back down the stairs, Akiko asks us to please keep the cat out of her room because she’s allergic. Or at least I think that’s what she said. She mimed it out for us, pretending to sneeze. It appears that King Pierre is about to be toppled from his throne. How on earth will he go back to living among us mere peasants?

There’s another photo of M/Joel/William on the front page of the newspaper today. There it is, the regretful mug shot. I prefer the drawing, now a collector’s item, which I’ve stashed among my LPs. He’s been released from the hospital and he’s currently in police custody. He’s entered a plea of not guilty to the charges against him. Imagine that? I’m not really sure what happens next but as Tom Waits famously wrote: “You’ll need an attorney for this journey.” And even the very best attorney couldn’t get him off, so I guess he’s going to jail, probably San Quentin. It’s not far from here, at the end of the Richmond–San Rafael bridge. At least he’ll have nice views and an ocean breeze. My mom has a friend who teaches creative writing to the inmates there. Maybe he could write his biography. He could call it
The Big Book of Regret
.

The day of the date arrives and I talk my mom through her usual predate weirdness, and when Ravi arrives to pick her up ten minutes early, holding a bouquet of sunflowers and looking handsomer than ever, she descends the staircase looking like he’s never seen her look before. It’s not the clothes—she finally settled on jeans and a silk jacket—it’s the look on her face. She’s looking at him like he’s her date, not her disheveled boss, and that’s got to make him feel nice.

I say good-bye to those crazy kids and I stroll over to the noodle house on College with the new
Rolling Stone
magazine and my notebook tucked under my arm. I get in line behind a few people and when it’s my turn I order a big bowl of udon noodles with tofu and vegetables and an iced green tea and then I pull up a chair at one of the tiny wooden tables scattered around the restaurant. I flip through my notebook; I’ve almost got the new issue of the
Vinyl Princess
fanzine put together. It’s twelve pages long this time. Turns out there’s a lot more to say about vinyl than I thought. One of the reasons it’s longer now is that I’ve got little features on some of the LPs from my blog with some of the best posted comments, which are really great, better than anything I could have come up with.

Something moving in my peripheral vision compels me to look up. A few tables away from me, Zach is wiping down an identical table to the one I’m sitting at. I watch, amused, as he scours the tabletop and then lays out his chopsticks, his order number on a metal stand, and a napkin, carefully, at ninety-degree angles. Once he’s done that, he pulls out a book and opens it to a bookmarked page. Then he looks up and he sees me. His face changes into that fight-or-flight look you get when you know you’re screwed. I smile and wave. He slowly waves with two fingers like bunny ears. Coincidentally, he’s wearing a T-shirt with a crudely drawn rabbit on the front. He gets up tentatively and walks over to me.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“So, you’re okay. You look okay, that is.” The truth is, he looks pale. “I thought that maybe you were sick or something, you know, because you haven’t been by the store.”

“I’m okay. I’ve been under a self-imposed house arrest.”

“Why? What did you do?”

“Oh, nothing, I just needed a time-out.”

“From?”

“Myself.”

“So, what got you out again?”

“Hunger. I ran out of crackers and peanut butter.”

“Oh. Crunchy or smooth?”

He scratches his forehead. “Smooth.”

I should have guessed.

The waitress puts my bowl of steaming udon down in front of me. He sees an opportunity for escape.

“Well. I guess I’ll leave you to your noodles.” He turns to go.

“No. Sit with me . . . please. Could you?”

He glances around the restaurant with a look of consternation on his face.

“I guess I could. I’ll go get my stuff.”

He returns and goes through the whole routine again with his half of the table.

“Do you think the virus is contained or should we put on hazmat suits?” I ask him.

“What? Oh . . . this is just something I do. Try to ignore me.”

“Will do.”

The waitress arrives seconds later with his noodles and he apologizes for switching tables, as though she might care. She walks away while he’s in midsentence. He looks closely at his bowl, leans over and smells it, and then he gets to work eating all of one thing and then moving on to the next. Not an easy task when everything is floating in broth. You can tell he was the kind of kid who never let different foods on his plate touch one another, and that was probably just the tip of the iceberg.

“Hey, Zach.” I look down at my noodles. “You know that time you asked me out?”

I look up at him. He looks mortified. “I think I remember that,” he croaks. “But I wasn’t asking you out. I asked you to ‘hang out.’ There’s a difference.”

“Oh, yeah? What is it?”

He starts to say something and then he stops. “You know, I’m not sure. Near as I can tell, the only difference is probably that the guy doesn’t pay for everything.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’m a modern woman. Anyway, that was kind of a tough week for me and I wasn’t myself that day. I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“You didn’t. I don’t have feelings.” He flattens his hair with his fingers. It immediately springs up again.

“Well, the truth is, I’d really like to ‘hang out’ with you sometime. That is, if you still want to.”

“Oh, okay, sure. Maybe I could call you or something.”

“What are you doing after this?”

“What, like tonight?”

“Uh-huh.”

“No solid plans. That is, except for the self-imposed house arrest, and that’s sort of tentative.”

“You could come over to my place if you like. I live about fifty steps in that direction.” I point over my shoulder with my chopsticks.

“Okay.” I can see him mentally regrouping.

On the way to my house I tell Zach again and in great detail how much I love his mix and why. He takes the opportunity to explain his “process” to me. It’s not that different from mine. We both seem to grasp the idea that it’s so much more than throwing a bunch of songs on a CD.

We pass by the usual suspects on my end of College Avenue: a guy I refer to as Davy Crockett because he wears a buckskin outfit with fringe hanging off the arms and the legs and a stick through his earlobe about the length of a drinking straw with feathers and bones and beads hanging off it; and Juanita, a large woman with pink cheeks who dresses like a wood nymph and sits outside the Nepalese restaurant day and night, quietly asking for handouts.

I swing open the front door of my house and turn to Zach. “Welcome to Shangri-la.”

I look around quickly to assess the damage. It’s not too bad if you don’t look too closely but then I remember that looking closely is what Zach’s all about.

I smile at him. He’s slowly taking it all in. He looks nervous.

“You’re not going to need to wipe the place down, are you?”

“Was there a fire in here recently?” he asks, sniffing the air and twitching his nose.

“Yeah. Wow, you can smell that?”

“It’s overpowering.”

“You should get a job searching for bodies in avalanches. I bet you’d be really good at it.”

“I have a very sensitive nose, that’s all.” He looks wounded.

“C’mon upstairs. I’ll show you my shrine.”

He trails behind me up the stairs to my bedroom. He hesitates in the doorway and takes a deep breath.

“C’mon in. It’s safe in here.”

“No, it’s not that. I just want to inhale that smell, you know, that old vinyl smell. It makes me feel good.”

“Good. You can do that from in here.”

A lava lamp on my desk bubbles goop around in slow motion. I flick on the light and he stands next to my wall of LPs, looking up, impressed. I take the opportunity to kick a dirty pair of underwear under the bed.

“Whoa. I knew you were a collector but I really wasn’t expecting this.” He looks at me. “You’re a freak.”

“That’s pretty big talk, coming from you.”

“Well, I meant that like . . . from one freak to another . . . respectfully.”

“You wanna hear something? Help yourself.” I sit back on the bed, propped up on my elbows, watching him.

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

He pulls out an LP from my blues section and looks at the back of it. He puts it back in its place and moves on to indie rock, and then punk rock. He holds the albums with the tips of his fingers like they’re the Dead Sea scrolls or something. There’s nowhere to sit except on my bed. I brush off some crumbs and Zach sits, keeping a polite distance away from me.

An hour later, Jeff Beck is on the turntable and Zach is still treating my bedroom like the Smithsonian. We talk about my records the way normal people talk about basketball trophies or academic awards. He asks me about an LP and I know exactly when I got it, where I got it and even whose collection it originally came from. I know the artist’s musical background and I know if they played in any other bands, even if it was only as a sideman, even if it was only for fifteen minutes. Music, to me, is one giant puzzle, and collecting music is about finding all the pieces and trying to fit them together. Like, for instance, the LP Zach is holding right now: Johnny Marr and the Healers. Well, Johnny Marr played with the Smiths; then he joined the The, then Electronic, and then the Healers, plus he was a guest musician on albums by Bryan Ferry, Billy Bragg, Oasis, Crowded House, Beth Orton, Beck, Pet Shop Boys, Lisa Germano, and the Talking Heads. It’s like a musical six degrees of separation.

I watch Zach being blown away by my collection and I notice that he seems very calm. He hasn’t twitched or scratched his face for over an hour. I realize that this must be his happy place, in a bubble, surrounded by music, and because I’m the owner of the bubble, I don’t make him nervous. I can totally relate to that.

“So, when do I get to see yours?” I ask him.

“Most of it’s still in New York. I shipped a couple of boxes I couldn’t live without. The rest is in storage.”

“You think you’ll ever move your collection out here?”

He looks at me. “Maybe.”

I go downstairs to get us drinks and notice that the red light is blinking on the answering machine. I hit play:

“Hey, it’s Kit. Um . . . where are you? I’ve been calling all night. You really need to get a cell phone . . . and a microwave. I need to talk to you, like right now. Call me . . . now.”

A second message plays:

“Oh, and did I mention that it’s important? Okay, so . . . call me.”

I fill two glasses with lemonade and take them back up to my bedroom.