Final Vinyl Days (10 page)

“You haven't changed a bit,” she said, and I felt her gaze from head to toe. It was the first time in years that I was
worried
about how I looked. “Neither have you.” I sat up straight, smoothed back my hair. God, why hadn't I taken a shower? “Why're you here?” I asked and glanced to the side where there was a cloudy aquarium with one goldfish swimming around. “I thought you were some place like California or Colorado or North Dakota. I thought you were married.” I thought that fish must feel like the only son of a bitch on the planet, thirty gallons of water and nobody to swim over and talk to.

“Divorced. I'm back in graduate school, psychology,” she said and laughed. “And I'm in this office because I fell down some steps.” I turned back from the dismal fish to see her holding out her right foot. Her ankle was blue and swollen. She had on a little white sock, the kind my mother always wore with her tennis shoes, with little colored pom-pom balls hanging off the backs.

“Can you believe it?” She shook her head back and forth. “It was really embarrassing. There were loads of people in the library when it happened.” She leaned back, her thick hair fanning behind her as she stared up at the ceiling. I kept expecting her to say something really stupid
and mundane and patronizing like
So, you say that you're living here but not in graduate school, you sell albums and tapes to coeds you occasionally sleep with, you say that you have a hangover, what I'm hearing from you is that you are in search of a sex partner who has possibly heard some songs from your youth
.

“I'm just as clumsy as I was the time we went camping,” she said, her voice light and far removed from the monotone I'd just imagined. “Remember? You swore you'd never take me again?”

“And I didn't,” I said. “I never got the chance.” I turned back to the fish. It was an awkward moment. You don't often get to discuss breaking up years after the fact, but we were doing it. She dumped me, and now that I had reminded her of that fact, she was talking in high gear to cover the tracks.
Why does it take so long to get seen in this place
? and
Do you ever get home? Does your dad still have the refrigerator store and is your mom well
?

I was relieved when the door opened and the nurse called me in. “See you around,” I said politely, half hoping that she'd disappear while I was gone. Marlene and I were the same age, from the same small town, the same neighborhood, even. I had known her since my family moved there when I was in the fifth grade and we had all run around screaming the words to “I Want to Hold Your
Hand” while making faces and crossing our eyes like Ringo did. Our common ground and memories was what had brought us together that month in college to begin with.

I thought about it while they stuck a thermometer in my mouth and instructed me to undress. Marlene had been pretty goofy as a kid, and though I considered her a friend, I never would have ridden my bike over to her house to
visit
. She had this dog named Alfie who smelled like crap, which left Marlene and her wet-dog-smelling jeans rather undesirable. In junior high, Matt Walker and I had suggested we put Alfie in front of a firing squad, and Marlene didn't speak to me for weeks after. No big deal, but then in high school we got to be pals just sort of hanging outside in the breezeway where you were allowed to smoke in between classes. Can you believe they
let
us smoke at school? That
they
, the administrators, those lop-sided adults had
designated
an area? I spent a lot of time there, and so did Marlene. She was on the Student Council, which most of us thought was a bunch of crap. She was forever circulating some kind of petition. She was really into womanhood, which I found kind of titillating in a strange way, don't ask me why, though I never did anything about it at the time. She was a hard worker, a smart girl. That's the kind of shit people wrote in her yearbook if they wrote anything at all. Nineteen seventy was not a
big year for yearbook signing. But then, get the girl off to college, and there is major metamorphosis. It was like I could watch it happening there in a poli sci lecture, blond streaks in her hair that hung to her waist, little shortie T-shirts and cutoff jeans, her tinted wire-rim glasses (aviator style, like Gloria Steinem) always pushed up on her head. Guys waited to see where she was going to sit and then clustered around her. God, she was beautiful, and then I had to take a turn just sitting and
listening
to all that was going on in her life, just as she had
listened
to me there in the smoking area. I had a girlfriend here and there along the way, but I guess I was really waiting for Marlene to come around. Her boyfriend had been drafted, and though she told me how lucky I was not to have been taken (lucky break, legal blindness; my brother winged me with a sharp rock when I was seven), I could tell that I was weakened in her eyes. There would have been much more admiration had I had twenty-twenty vision and fled to Canada. It was a brief affair, the consummation of any likes we'd had for each other since adolescence, and then it was over, one fiasco of a camping trip, pouring down rain, Marlene spraining her thumb when she tripped over a tree limb and landed face down in the mud. It amazed me the things that that damn thumb
hindered
her from doing. It was a loss of a weekend.

“You have the flu,” the nurse told me after I'd waited forever in my underwear, and I made my way back out to the lone-fish lobby to find her still there, though now her ankle was all neatly bound in an Ace bandage.

“You don't look so great,” she said. “Why don't I go home with you and fix you something for lunch.” I shrugged, thinking about what was in my kitchen cabinet, a moldy loaf of bread, a couple of cans of tomato soup, one can of tuna. If she could turn it into something, I'd beg her never to leave me.

“What about your car?” I asked. Again she pointed to her ankle.

“I can't drive. My ankle.” For a minute she sounded just like she had years before,
I can't do that, my thumb
, and I should have listened to the warning, but I was too taken by her features, a face that needed no makeup of any kind, a girl who
looked
like she
ought
to be a perfect camper.

“I rode the bus here,” she said and extended her hand for me to help her up. “It'll be fun to catch up on things.”

Marlene and I picked up with each other like we'd never been apart. It was like we could read each other's mind, and so we carefully avoided talking about the time we broke up. Instead we focused on all the good times,
things we had in common just by being the same age and from the same town. Like I might say, “Remember when Tim Oates cut off the tip of his finger in shop?” and she'd say, “Yeah, he was making a TV table for his mama.” Things like that. We had things in common that might
seem
absolutely stupid to an outsider. After three glorious months—triple our first time together—Marlene and I finally got around to talking about all the things that ruined us before. She was starting to kind of hint about how she was going to be a professional, and how maybe I would want to be
a professional
, too. I sang her that song, “I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy, you see by my outfit that I'm a cowboy, too.”

“C'mon,” she said and wrapped her arms around my neck, “I don't mean to give you a hard time, it's just I've heard you say how you really want …”

Bad connection, bad connection. “So get you an outfit and let's all be cowboys.” I finished the song, and she went to take her exam in a huff. I did what I always do when I'm feeling lousy, which is to sort through my albums and play all of my favorite cuts. I should have been a deejay, the lone jockey on the late-night waves, rather than employee to a squat coked-to-the-gills little rich shit. I thought of Marlene writing some spiel about
composure
: heal thyself. I was playing Ten Years After full blast, Sly
and the Family Stone on deck. And then all in one second I felt mad as hell, as mad as I'd been on that pouring-rain camping trip when Marlene told me that it was hard for her to think of me as anything except
a friend
. She actually said that. It all came back to me when I saw that old Black Sabbath album, which is what she had left behind that other time she moved out. Thanks a whole helluva lot. Warms my heart to see a green-faced chick draped in scarves wandering around what looks like a mausoleum. She had said
all
the routine things you can think of to say. “I know you don't really care about me,” she had said. “I could be
anybody
.”

“Yeah, right,” I had told her. “I could cuddle up with Pat Paulsen and not care. I'm just that kind of insensitive jerk.”

“But you don't care about
me
,” she had said and pounded her chest with her hand, which was wrapped in a bath towel to protect the sprained thumb that had left her an absolute invalid. “I need to be my own person, have my own life.”

I found out a day later that she already had all the info on those schools in the West; she had been looking for a good time to bail out, and it seemed camping out in a monsoon was perfect. It was hard to remember, but it seemed I said something like, “And I don't need to have
my own life?” and then the insults got thicker until before long I was told that I was apathetic and chauvinistic and my brain was stuck between my legs.

“So that's why you're always asking what I'm thinking,” I said in response. By that time we were soaking wet and driving back
down
the rest of this mountain in the piece-of-crap car I had at the time, an orange Pinto, with a Jimi Hendrix tape playing full blast (eight-track of course). “And what kind of stupid question is that anyway, but you always ask it.
What are you thinking
?” Yeah, that was how the whole ride home went, and of course any time I had a good line, any time I scored, she got to cry and say what an ass I was.

By the time she got home from her lousy test, I was as mad as if I were still there in the pouring rain, jacking that screwed-up Pinto to change a flat while she sat in the passenger side and stared straight ahead at the long stretch of road we had to travel before I could put her out. Apparently, she had been thinking it through as well, because she walked into my apartment looking just as she had when I dumped her out in front of her dorm years before. We had both played over the old stuff enough that we had independently been furious and now were simply exhausted and ready to have it all end, admit the truth.
Nothing in common other than walking the planet at the same time. She was barely over her divorce, she rationalized (he had dumped her I was delighted to find). I handed her that Black Sabbath album on her way out for the second time, and we made polite promises about keeping in touch.

And now I've come to this: Final Vinyl Days, the end of an era. Perfectly round black vinyl discs sit inside their faded jackets on the small table in front of my checkout and await extinction. I stare across the street, the black asphalt made shiny by the drizzling rain, the traffic light blinking red and green puddles in the gray light where a mammoth parking deck is under construction. There I see the lights in the store we compete with, Record City, and I can't help but wonder when they'll change their name; CD Metropolis. But what can I say about names? Any Old Way You Choose It ain't exactly true either.

“Record City doesn't have
these
,” my boss had said just last week and began sticking this crap up all over the place. You know, life-size cutouts of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis, miniature replicas of the old tabletop jukeboxes that are
really
CD houses, piñatas, and big plastic blow-up dinosaurs. I work nights now, not as much business, and I don't have to argue with the owner about what I play overhead. As far as I'm concerned, the new kids on the
block are still Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne. My boss said it was a promotion, but I know better. Janis Joplin's singing now, “Me and Bobby McGee.” And the Stones are on deck with “Jumping Jack Flash.” The Stones are the cockroaches of rock. They'll be around when civilization starts over, and I cling to this bit of optimism.

I had no choice but to give in to CDs. And yeah, they sound great, that's true. It's just the principle of the thing, your hand forced to change. Not to even mention the dreaded task of
replacing
. It's impossible. Think of what's
not
available. I'm just taking my time is all. I figure if I just go from the year of my birth to the year I graduated from college, it'll take the rest of my life. I'm going alphabetically so that I don't miss anything and it's a bored, calculated way to approach life. I mean, what if that's how I dealt with women. Imagine it: Betts, Erica, Gail, Marlene, Nancy, that one who always wore black—either Pat or Pam—Susie, Xanadu. Yeah, right, Xanadu. I thought it was kinda cute that she had gone and renamed herself. Then I learned that she had never even heard of Coleridge. Hers was some vivid childhood memory of Olivia Newton John. Scary. We were in a bar, and it was very very late so what could I expect? “Let's get physical,” I suggested, and she raised her pencil-thin eyebrows as if trying to remember where she'd heard
that
line before. “Can I call you Xan?”

“Oh, sure,” she said, “everybody does.” And when she walked ahead of me to the door, I noticed her spiderweb stockings complete with rhinestone spider. She wore a very tight black miniskirt, and I realized that my knowledge of women's fashions had come full circle. I looked at myself in the beer-can-lined mirror to affirm that, yes, I had hit bottom. Xan and I had
nothing
in common except cotton mouth and body hair.

Now Del Shannon has gone and shot himself, and no one has even
asked
about his music. I hear the song “Runaway” and I see myself, a typical nine-year-old slouch, stretched out on my bed with a stack of comic books and the plug of my transistor radio wedged in my ear. My mom made me a bedspread that looked like a race car. The headlights down at the end faced into the hallway where my dad was standing in his undershirt, his face coated in lather. “C'mon, honey,” my mom said. “We've got to get down to the store,” and then there we all were in front of this little cinder-block store at the edge of town, our last name painted in big red letters on the window. There must have been at least ten people gathered for the opening, an event my dad later said (while we waited for our foot-long hot dogs to be delivered to the window of the car) was just about the proudest moment of his life. He
said it was second only to marrying my mother (she had vanilla shake on her lips as she smiled back at him) and having my younger brother and me. My brother was in a French-fry frenzy, bathing the fries in the pool of catsup he'd poured into the cardboard container, but he stopped to take in the seriousness of my dad's announcement. I remember wondering how you
know
when it's the happiest moment and being dumbfounded that anyone could build a life on refigerators and stoves and be happy about it. It amazes me to think that I ever sat in the backseat of that old Chevrolet and looked at my parents (younger then than I am now) and thought how ridiculously
out-dated
they were.