Old Records Never Die (4 page)

And that's what I kept telling myself, and kept believing. Until Questlove came along and fucked everything up.

“Those skates looked like something out of
Xanadu
,” Questlove said, trying to describe Prince's roller skates. “That's the only way I could describe them. They glowed and sparkled. It was so magical, I had to pinch myself.”

I laughed at all the right spots, like I would do in any interview, but I was barely listening. I was still stuck on his records, and how he'd held on to the things I let slip away without a second thought.

“So listen, quick follow up about ‘Rapper's Delight,'” I said.

“Um, yeah?” Quest said.

“Not saying that you would, but if you had sold it . . .”

“I'd never sell it.”

“No, of course not. But if you lost it. Or if you lent it to somebody and they never gave it back.”

“I'd just go ask them—”

“But they lent it to another friend, who took it on a backpacking trip to Europe, and he's not a hundred percent sure where he left it, but maybe at a youth hostel in Amsterdam.”

Questlove said nothing, but I could hear him swallowing hard.

“Or your wife had a garage sale without telling you, not because you needed the money but just to get all this crap out of the house. ‘Rapper's Delight' is gone, and she doesn't have a clue who bought it.”

More silence.

“Okay,” he finally managed. “I guess anything's possible.”

“Would you go looking for it?”

“The record?”

“Yes,” I said. “Would you try to find it, despite the ridiculous odds against you ever seeing it again?”

He didn't hesitate. “I would, yeah.”

A
re you okay?”

This was a question that Kelly, my wife, had been asking me a lot lately. Not in the rhetorical way she might ask if I'd had too much to drink the night before, or if I'd been spending too much time on Facebook. A gentle nudge that maybe I hadn't been making the best of decisions. No, this time she asked with a worried lilt to her voice. Like she was legitimately concerned about my emotional well-being.

“I'm great,” I told her.

She stood next to the door of my office, looking at me with a fixed gaze, all but daring me to stick with that story.

She didn't need to explain what was making her uneasy. It was painfully obvious. I was sitting alone in my office at noon, the computer turned off, doing no discernible work, just staring at my copy of
Doolittle
, the vinyl record I'd bought from Reckless a few days ago. Which of course I hadn't played, because we didn't own a record player. But I carried it around like a widower might carry around a photo of his dead wife.

I knew I was sad, but I couldn't put my finger on why. I hoped it
wasn't the obvious stuff. The fact that I was in my midforties, and life wasn't as uncomplicated and self-indulgent as it was when I was twenty-two. The world didn't revolve around me anymore. But who doesn't realize that eventually? You get married and have a kid—or many kids—and your days suddenly have more structure. You can't say things to your significant other like, “Let's spend the day in bed, watching all of the
Godfather
movies.” Certainly not on a Tuesday, when it's the most irresponsible (and therefore the most fun) to binge-watch movies you've seen a thousand times already.

I didn't want it to be that. Because that would mean I was the worst kind of cliché. A midlife crisis? Was I really that one-dimensional? Had growing older made me that predictably melancholy? I was like a fucking Jackson Browne song. Why not just buy a sports car and find a mistress? But it wasn't that simple. I wasn't upset about growing older. I kinda liked being older. It meant fewer expectations. Nobody gets upset when a forty-five-year-old guy with a kid leaves the party at ten because he's tired. Nobody scoffs at the forty-five-year-old who wears a rash guard at the pool because he doesn't feel like sucking in his gut. Nobody blinks at the forty-five-year-old guy who wears polyester bowling shirts and knee-length wallet chains that haven't been cool since
Swingers
. The bar is low for the middle-aged guy, and that's just where I liked it.

But something was missing that I couldn't get past. And it wasn't my youth.

I met Kelly in the midnineties, in Chicago. We were both employees at the Second City comedy theater, the place where comedy legends like John Belushi, Bill Murray, and Stephen Colbert got their start. I worked in the box office, and she was a host—which basically involved making sure everybody in the audience had a chair. We both made minimum wage and had no health insurance, but we stayed up all night drinking with enormously talented people, many
of whom would go on to become household names. Sometimes we just slept in the theater, spooning under huge black-and-white photos of Gilda Radner and Chris Farley.

Four years into dating, I asked her to marry me. The engagement ring was a grape-flavored lollipop ring, because it was all I could afford, but it was still enough to make her happy-cry. We decided to leave Chicago and try a new city, because that's what all our friends did. Nobody stayed in Chicago forever. It was like college—the place you learned everything you needed, to go someplace else and become an adult.

Over the next few decades, we lived in every time zone in the country—in LA as we both tried and failed to be screenwriters; in Salt Lake City, Utah, while she worked for the Sundance Film Festival and I was a househusband; in various cities in Florida, when we decided being warm all the time was enough; in Sonoma, California, when we decided being drunk on expensive wine was enough. We kept moving, looking for whatever was next, staying just long enough to decide this wasn't what we wanted.

And now we were back in Chicago, renting a tiny twelve-hundred-square-foot second-floor apartment on the North Side, with a three-year-old son named Charlie with boundless energy and beautiful blond locks. Our days moved at a dizzying pace, and there just never seemed to be enough time to do everything that needed doing. There were playdates to be hosted, and groceries to be put away, and laundry to be folded, and preschool applications to be filled out, and savings accounts to be emptied because we totally forgot that our car payment was overdue, and a son to be reminded, “No, no, you can't put Sharpie on turkey meat” or “You are absolutely not running outside naked, covered in lotion! I don't care if you're an alien now!”

When I heard myself complain, I wanted to punch myself in my
own whiny face. It wasn't like I was juggling three jobs to make ends meet, or was ever one missed mortgage payment away from being homeless, or argued with the insurance company because my kid has cancer and he wasn't getting the right treatment. I was angry because my time wasn't my own anymore, and my days were filled with making sure we had enough batteries, and we remembered to pay the electric bill, and my son hadn't been watching too much TV, and my wife felt like I was actually paying attention to her and not just nodding while I checked my e-mail. I found the perfect balance between my family and my work, even though that meant I didn't get a moment to myself until 10:00 p.m. usually, and at that point I just wanted to crawl into bed and fall asleep watching
Seinfeld
reruns.

My life was fine. Blessed, even.

I was acutely reminded of this when the wife of an old friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. It spread to her brain, and eventually the rest of her body. The asshole cancer finally got the better of her, and her doctors sent her home, saying there was nothing else they could do. She had just a few months to live, maybe less. So we drove out to say our good-byes. Standing by her deathbed—her literal deathbed, as in the bed in which she'd be dying, possibly while we were standing there, holding her hand and wondering what to say—was surreal. I'd visited sick people, but never someone who'd been told to stop fighting, that all they can do now is wait for the end. Especially when that person is right around your age, and your last memory of them is from the previous summer, when you had her and her husband over for dinner, and you all got drunk on too many bottles of red wine and talked about trying to get pregnant (she and Kelly were fertility buddies), and joked about the past and how quickly it vanished and was replaced by adult responsibilities and isn't that unfair, but oh well, let's crank up the music and open another bottle. Now here she was, her eyes red and swollen shut, her
mouth agape, like she was doing an impression of Edvard Munch's
The Scream
, so close to the end that just watching her chest rise and fall seemed like a miracle.

We left after an hour, and Kelly and I didn't say much during the drive home. We were too shaken. If we needed a reminder that life is precious and fleeting, and you should be thankful for every minute, this was it. We promised ourselves never to forget how lucky we were, and how much we had to be grateful for.

It only took a few days for that to wear off, and for us to start grumbling again. Yes, yes, our friend with cancer. Life is precious; we get it. But it's garbage night, and I still haven't put out the recycling, and Charlie needs a bath and somehow Kelly got it into her head that it's my turn, which is fucking bullshit, and I have three stories due by tomorrow morning, and a couple dozen e-mails to respond to, and our credit score has plummeted again because somebody (I'm not pointing any fingers) forgot to pay the cable bill, and I haven't checked Facebook in hours, and Jesus Christ, I can't even get a moment to hear myself think!

When I looked at old photos of Kelly and me, back in our twenties, I was amazed. Not by how young we were, or how effortlessly thin, but how carefree we seemed. How uncomplicated our lives were, even if we didn't realize it at the time. We used to be so unburdened by . . . everything, really. In those pictures, we have the relaxed expressions of people who don't have demanding careers or obligations or commitments (other than to each other). Being poor isn't fun, but being poor when you're twenty-three and you know you can probably call your parents and beg them into sending you a rent check if you run out of options, well, there are worse things in this world.

If we wanted to, we could have just disappeared. We could have gone off the grid for weeks, dropping what little responsibilities we had, on the grounds that we had to “find ourselves” or, just as
important, take the weekend to listen to the new Beck record—I mean really listen to it, until we knew all the songs by heart and could sing along without thinking about it.

Kelly and I got married at thirty—by my father, who was a pastor—and carried on living pretty much like we had before. There'd be time enough for buying houses, or jobs we'd stay at for longer than a year, or cities we wouldn't abandon when they got too familiar. And kids. We wanted kids, sure, but kids someday. It was always someday, in the vaguely-near-but-definitely-distant future. And when we had a kid, oh boy, it would be spectacular. We wouldn't be like those parents content with raising tiny pink versions of themselves. Ours would be different. They would be cool and uncomplicated and happy, because we'd be old enough not to fall into the same parenting traps that we saw the people in their twenties fall into. We'd watch the
Star Wars
movies with them (which they'd love even more than we did) and we'd introduce them to all the cool music and pop culture, and they'd be so grateful. But we'd also be the disciplinarians. When they'd ask to get a tattoo of the Neutral Milk Hotel aeroplane phonograph, we'd say absolutely not, until you're at least eighteen. Sorry to be the bad guys, but that's what parents do.

We didn't get around to having a kid until we were both forty. It felt like that part in action movies when the hero skids under a metal or stone wall as it's closing, just barely making it through before the wall comes crashing down on his legs. We'd tried on our own, and then tried fertility treatments, and were on the verge of giving up when, after a night fueled by too much vodka, we got pregnant the old-fashioned way.

After Charlie was born, our life changed fast. And it kept changing, usually in inches, until one day I woke up and looked at myself in the mirror and couldn't believe how tired I looked. Not old, just tired.

Which led me to where I was that day, sitting listlessly in my office, feeling brain-dead and sad for no particular reason, holding on to an overpriced Pixies remaster like a life raft.

I wasn't really paying attention when Charlie wandered into the room and slipped the
Doolittle
out of my hands. He sat on the floor and examined it more closely. He emptied the record out of its sleeve and brushed a finger against the black vinyl, like he was trying to wake up a tablet computer.

“How does this work?” he asked.

“It doesn't play by itself,” I explained. “It needs something called a record player.”

He looked at me. “What's that?”

“It's a big machine with a plate on top that spins around and around, and you put the record on the spinning plate, and then there's a little robot arm with a tiny needle that you put on the record as it's spinning, and that makes music.”

He grimaced. Actually grimaced. A three-year-old boy rarely grimaces, unless he's being forced to eat vegetables or take a bath when he's perfectly happy being muddy. But my explanation of how a record player works was enough to make him grimace.

He turned his attention to the
Doolittle
album cover. “Who's the monkey?” he asked earnestly.

“I don't know, just some monkey. He's not in the band or anything.”

“Who's in the band?”

“Black Francis. Kim Deal. And two other guys. They're a band called the Pixies. Daddy used to love them.”

“You don't love them anymore?” Charlie asked.

Well, my young Charlie, that's a whole can of worms you're opening up. Of course I still loved them. I used to listen to their records like it was my job, like I was being paid to sit in a dark
apartment, headphones strapped to my head, and absorb the songs until they felt indistinguishable from my own memories. I would jump into cars with guys I hardly knew, based only on vague promises that they knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who could get us tickets to a Pixies show.

But I'd reached an age when my enthusiasm for rock shows wasn't what it used to be. Just a few weeks before this conversation with my son, an old friend—a guy I'd seen more than a few Pixies shows with in my youth—offered me tickets to a Pixies reunion in Chicago. I'd seen my last Pixies show with him just a few years earlier, in Detroit. And the experience was underwhelming. A Pixies concert in the twenty-first century is a strange juxtaposition. On the one hand, you have the inherent badassness of the music. But then you look around and realize that the audience is a sea of forty-something dudes like you, with Black Francis man-nipples and nowhere to go but down. The wave of mutilation has been replaced by a wave of “I'm going to sit down during the slow songs.”

Even so, I didn't want to turn down another chance to see them live. If I said no this time, it'd mean something significant. Like realizing it'd been a few months since you'd made love with your wife and you were okay with that. But I had to say no to the ticket anyway, for a myriad of reasons. There were work obligations—several interviews that at least had to be transcribed before the next day—and Kelly had already made plans with her mommy friends, and it was her night to go out, and I could always get a babysitter, but that would require calls to friends who were only sorta friends who had teenage girls old enough to babysit, and it all seemed too complicated and annoying.