Old Records Never Die (8 page)

“Just don't spend too much money on records you can't listen to and we don't have room for,” Kelly said.

Two hours later, I don't know where either of them are, and I'm holding a copy of
Bona Drag
, transfixed by the faded Crayola-blue cover. Pulling it out was like turning a corner and running into an ex-girlfriend, somebody whose old letters you still kept in a shoe box.

“Charlie, no!”

Kelly's voice jolted me out of daydreaming. I couldn't see her, but I could hear him, somewhere behind me, his little feet scurrying like a rat in a tenement, giggling as he ducked through legs and evaded capture. I could see the eyes widen in the adults who noticed him, alarmed not so much about a three-year-old running so fast through a maze fraught with so many dangers, but those outstretched chocolate fingers, aimed like swords at their precious vinyl.

“Elvis Costello!”

Charlie was crouched under a table, pulling records out of boxes and roughly examining them. He'd pretend to read each title before yelling “Elvis Costello!” and then he'd slam each delicate little disk onto the floor, with such force it was a miracle they didn't shatter under his fist.

The night before, we'd listened to some Elvis Costello—his favorite artist of the moment—and he asked if Costello had records. I told him yes, many, many records, some better than others, and if he searched really hard tomorrow, looked in every box and on every table, he might find some.

A man with bushy gray eyebrows and Frank Zappa facial hair
was zeroing in on Charlie. “Sir, sir, please be careful with those,” he blustered, looking panicky and uncertain. This was obviously new terrain for him, as he called a three-year-old “sir.”

“Elvis Costello go BAM!”

My forehead tightened. I loosened my grip on
Bona Drag
, let it fall back into the box. I had to restrain my child before he destroyed enough records to decimate my entire record-buying budget.

“That your kid?” I heard a voice ask, as I wrestled an already battered copy of
Spike
out of Charlie's lobster claws. I looked up and saw two guys, roughly my own age, with the compulsory rock T-shirts—one sported a Dinosaur Jr. album illustration, the other was Guns N' Roses. They had bodies like Russian nesting dolls, neckless and smooth. They were, thus far, the only people in this building who had looked at Charlie with anything besides fearful derision. As I held tightly on to Charlie, the one in the Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt told me, unsolicited, everything about his history with recorded music.

“I got my first record player when I was about his age,” he said, nodding to my son. “I used to sit on the floor and watch the records go around and around and around. I was a psycho.” He burst into loud laughter.

“You're still a fucking psycho,” his friend in the Guns N' Roses shirt offered.

“Fuck your ass,” Dinosaur Jr. countered.

I covered Charlie's ears. They both continued talking, telling me how their childhood fascination had grown into a lifelong hobby that sounded just slightly less depressing than a tax accountant's.

“I've got over fifty thousand albums,” said Guns N' Roses. “That includes about ten thousand in my core collection, which are the ones I won't sell. They're my babies. I also have about seven thousand forty-fives that are also my babies. The others are hobos. Those are the ones that travel.”

“And you'll sell the hobos?” I asked.

“Hobos can always go. One way or another, they'll come back to you. But the babies, you have to protect them. Keep them in the house, away from the world . . .”

Dinosaur Jr. was laughing. “You're so queer.”

Guns N' Roses just shrugged. “You know what the thing is though? I'm finally starting to lose interest.”

“Liar.”

“No, it's happening. I'm always looking for new stuff, but then you get the new stuff, and you play it a few times, and then file it away in a box. I've got responsibilities now. I have to cut the grass.”

Kelly emerged from the crowd, and without even breaking stride, lifted Charlie from my arms. “I've got him,” she said, still moving.

“Wait, are you—?” I called after her.

“Do what you need to do,” she said. “Just please be fast about it, okay?”

“Can we help you find something?” Guns N' Roses asked.

I glanced down at the dozen or so boxes of records, which now seemed like a hopelessly time-consuming job.

“You have the Replacements'
Let It Be
?” I asked.

They both laughed. “Setting the bar a little high, aren't you?” Dinosaur Jr. asked.

“So . . . no?”

“I've seen a
Don't Tell a Soul
every once in a while,” he said. “And a few months ago I had a copy of
Tim
in my store for almost exactly thirty minutes before it sold. But I have never, in my forty years of doing this professionally, seen an original
Let It Be
. Like ever. That includes in the eighties.”

“So it's like looking for Bigfoot?” I asked, trying to be funny.

“No,” Dinosaur Jr. said matter-of-factly. “I've seen Bigfoot before.”

“Yeah, I've seen Bigfoot,” said Guns N' Roses. “That's no big deal.”

I don't know why
Let It Be
was so important to me. There are a million reasons why it shouldn't be. There is almost nothing about it that is or has ever been directly relatable to me or my life. I've had no experience with androgyny—other than wearing pseudo-drag to a
Rocky Horror Picture Show
screening during my freshman year of college—and have never had any friends with androgynous tendencies, other than the aforementioned
Rocky Horror Picture Show
outings and the occasional David Bowie Halloween costume. I've never been an alcoholic who's had a moment of sad self-realization at his favorite dive bar, and I've never been in a band bemused by a more popular band's video on MTV. I've never been in a long-distance relationship with somebody and tried to call her at night and left a series of answering-machine messages that made me feel emotionally alienated. I've never even had my tonsils taken out. I've had boners, of course, but nothing on “Gary's Got a Boner” spoke to my experience with erections, especially the “gonna stick it to her” part.

Probably the only song that I felt even slightly connected to a personal level was “Unsatisfied.” I'm not sure what was unsatisfying to Paul Westerberg, but it probably didn't involve sneaking into a mall movie theater to see
Hardbodies 2
and not being all that impressed with the naked boobs, which you'd been led to believe would be in greater numbers.

As a teenager, nothing about me was punk. I didn't have any piercings, my body was utterly untattooed, and when I first started listening to the 'Mats, I hadn't smoked so much as a joint. But I still loved
Let It Be
. Probably because it was the complete opposite of who I was at the time. I was the awkward teenager who played
trombone, was terrible at sports, and listened to too much Billy Joel. Maybe the Billy Joel part wasn't so bad, but from my experience, teenagers who say things like “I can sing the lyrics to ‘You May Be Right' from memory” don't also say things like “I'm exhausted from getting all these hand jobs!”

When I listened to
Let It Be
, it made me feel instantly like one of the cool kids, who were losers by choice, and whose disaffection was at least partly a pose, because they were almost certainly getting laid. My
Let It Be
album was a security blanket, a secret that I carried with me every time I went to school, or had any interaction with my suburban peers. I knew something that they didn't. These fucking assholes, who thought Duran Duran and Corey fucking Hart were music. They thought they had it all figured out. But it was like they were looking for nourishment in Coke commercials when I'd found Salinger novels. And they didn't even realize that Salinger existed! They were starving to death, and they didn't even realize it.

After another humiliating and unfulfilling day, I'd come home and go to my bedroom and put on
Let It Be
, and cling to the record sleeve and stare at the front cover photo of those four wasted Midwestern punks sitting on a rooftop. It was like gamma rays going into Bruce Banner. It turned me into the Hulk. Maybe not on the outside. But a Hulk heart was beating in my chest, even if nobody else noticed it.

As a teen, I somehow ended up in possession of a tattered copy of the Replacements' bootleg
The Shit Hits the Fans
. To hear me talk about it now, it was my musical bible, a lifeline to sanity in a suburban Scheol. But really, I probably listened to it only once or twice, and then only halfheartedly. Hindsight, as least when it comes to music, is never twenty-twenty. You downplay your fist-pumping devotion to Def Leppard and Poison and hyperbolize your unconditional love for the Pixies and the Meat Puppets.

But I don't think I've given too much credit to
Let It Be
. Because
my biggest, most visceral memory of that record is not having it when I really needed it the most.

I can remember everything and nothing about the day my father died. Everything about the shape of the day is a blur. But the details that stick in my head are inanely specific. I remember that Kelly and I were drinking Australian wine in the afternoon. We'd recently moved to Burbank and were so oppressively poor that getting a buzz on inexpensive booze in the afternoon was one of the few pleasures we could afford. I remember that the married couple across the street were blaring that Sugar Ray song—“every morning” bah-bah-bah-bah “my girlfriend's four-post bed”—it was the same song they always played whenever they were fighting because they thought it drowned out the noise, but it really didn't. We could still hear them, although only in bursts, just enough to create a tapestry of marital misery. A little “your goddamn mother” here and “you never touch me” there, and we got the general idea.

I remember when my mom called, and we talked for several minutes about nothing in particular. She told me about the weather in Michigan—it had snowed recently, and though it was only a few inches, there were apparently more snowplows on the streets than cars—and she asked innocuous questions about our new apartment and the smog in Los Angeles and if there was a grocery store near us that didn't require getting on a freeway. And then, just as I thought we'd covered the necessary chitchat topics and I was preparing to hang up, she dropped the bomb.

She told me where she'd found him, facedown on the kitchen floor, a half-eaten egg salad sandwich on the table, and how she'd immediately called 911, although she could tell from his lack of a pulse and the coldness of his skin that it was a lost cause.

“I should come home,” I told her.

“No, no,” she said. “You're busy.”

“Mom.”

“It's too expensive. Have you seen the cost of plane tickets lately? It's outrageous! I can't do that to you.”

“I can afford it,” I insisted.

“You can barely afford your phone bill, how can you afford a flight from California to Michigan?”

“Do we have to do this now?”

“I'm just saying, I'm worried about you. You don't need another unexpected expense. I don't want to be a burden. Especially now, with your father gone. We're all going through a lot.”

I wondered why she wasn't crying. And then I wondered why I wasn't crying. Was none of this real? It didn't seem real. It seemed like that moment in a dream when you realize it's a dream and you think, “Oh man, this is crazy. I gotta pay attention so I remember this when I wake up.”

“If you need to come out,” she finally relented, “let me pay for it.”

“No.”

“I insist. Hold on, just let me find the credit card.”

I heard a rustling sound, like an arm plunged into an overflowing garbage can.

“You don't have to do this,” I pleaded with her.

“I want to do it,” she assured me. “Just don't book your flight with Southwest again.”

“What's wrong with Southwest?”

“Do you know what it cost us to fly you out for Thanksgiving?”

“That wasn't my idea.”

“I can't even talk about it. It makes me sick.”

“They'll try and charge you an arm and a leg because it's last-minute,” she warned me. “Maybe you should wait to come out until next weekend.”

“Mom, stop it!”

“I'm just saying, those big airlines know how to take advantage. Don't let them overcharge you. Have you thought about Spirit Airlines? They're always very reasonable.”

“I don't think they have flights from California.”

“No? That's surprising. They have wonderful rates for flights between Michigan and Florida. The last time I visited your great-aunt, I booked the entire trip for less than eighty-nine dollars. Isn't that remarkable?”