The Vinyl Princess (10 page)

“Okay. See ya later.”

Bob walks out into the sunshine with what almost looks like a spring in his step. He stops to talk to Jimmy, the incense salesman. I can see them out there, arms waving, discussing the finer points of being an avenue merchant. When he finishes up with Jimmy, he’s still got Precious, who sells jewelry, Celeste, who sells glass water pipes, and Sonia, who does henna tattoos, all of whom Bob will stop to chat with. It’ll be at least an hour before he makes it to the bank. It takes Dao five minutes.

Later, on a whim, when Aidan skulks past me (slight nod, almost inaudible hello) on his way out to lunch, I slip back to the Cave and put a
VP
zine on his wooden processing table. Maybe I’m looking for his approval, but maybe I want him to feel a sense of belonging, like,
Hey, you’re not the only whacked-out vinyl collector out there; come and join me. I don’t bite
.

Then I go back to freaking out about how I’m going to be sitting across from M in a matter of hours, drinking coffee, getting to know him.

I
arrive at the café a couple of minutes after five. He’s sitting at a small table waiting for me. He smiles again when he sees me and I sit down across from him. The waiter, a regular Bob & Bob’s customer, a classical vinyl collector, takes my order after exchanging a few pleasantries. M already has a cappuccino in front of him.

“Sorry. I’d have introduced you but I don’t know your name.”

“Joel.”

Joel? “I’m Allie.”

“Fancy coffee place you picked, Allie.” He sips his coffee.

I look around at the high ceilings and the old wooden floors. A pleasant Vivaldi violin concerto plays quietly. “I like this place when I need to get away from the store and hide. Is it too much?”

“No, I like it. It’s very peaceful.”

Joel has an accent but it’s not Southern, more like Eastern but not New York. I can’t place it. He doesn’t sound like anyone else around here, that’s for sure.

“So, where are you from, Joel?”

“Oh, here and there, mostly there. I was born in New Jersey, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“What brings you all the way out to California?”

“I have a buddy out here, a guy from back east, and he said he could set me up with a job and I just thought I’d come out and try it for a while.”

“What kind of job?”

A couple, a shapely Latina and her boyfriend, come into the café and take the table across from us. Joel’s eyes linger on her until her boyfriend notices and glares at him.

“I do maintenance at the graveyard on Piedmont; you know it?”

“Sure.” Everyone from around here knows that graveyard; it’s enormous. “You like it?”

“It’s okay. Mostly I just ride a lawn mower around and around the gravestones till I’m dizzy.” He laughs.

The waiter puts my coffee down in front of me.

“You don’t mind all the dead people?”

“Nah.” He watches me stir a packet of sugar into my coffee. “Hey, I like that store you work at; it’s cool,” he says.

“Yeah, I like it too.”

“You been there long?”

“Two years.”

“Wow, you must run the place. Is this your first job?”

“Yup.”

“I heard about the robberies. Are you freaked out about them over there?”

I shrug. “Not really.”

“I would be.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I got robbed once.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. One of the craziest jobs I ever had was back in Jersey working at a cool old bowling alley for a guy named Giovanni. It was right on the Jersey shore. I was pretty young too, but Giovanni trusted me; he loved me like a son. Man, I never worked so hard in my life. Every morning, before we opened the doors, I was supposed to take the bank deposit from the night before out of the old safe and over to the bank across the street. One morning, I’m walking across the street with the money and I get jumped from behind. I never knew what hit me, never even saw the guy. I went down hard right there on the pavement, in the middle of the road, passed out cold. When I woke up the money was gone and there was a puddle of blood under my head. Here, I’ve still got the scar.” He pulls his hair back to show me. It’s a faint crisscross, about two inches long. I resist the urge to run my finger over it.

“That’s brutal. Why would Giovanni let a kid do something so dangerous?”

“He liked having breakfast with his family in the morning before he came in, and I had to get the change for the cash drawers. Anyway, it was a safe neighborhood. I was just unlucky, I guess. The upside was that I got to bowl for free anytime and eat all the pizza I wanted.” He stops for a second, considering something. His face darkens. “That place was like home to me, a lot better than my real home.”

I’m about to ask about his family but then I catch myself—too early for personal questions. I quickly change directions. “My boss doesn’t really trust anyone with money. He’d take it home and stuff it in his mattress every night if he could. He does all the deposits himself. No one even has the combination to the safe. It’s a drop safe.” God, could I sound any duller? Next thing you know I’ll be sharing the California employee tax structure with him.

“I’d trust you with anything. You’ve got one of those faces.”

“One of what faces?”

“The kind you can trust.”

“I never thought of myself that way.”

“The minute I saw you, I knew you were that kind of person. It’s all in the eyes.”

He watches me with his cool blue-green eyes. I become self-conscious and look away. I’ve noticed now that he has a calm way of taking things in. It’s unnerving for someone like me, who has to react to everything. In a stolen glance here and there, I absorb him: His shoulders are narrow but he’s wearing a black tailored shirt that flatters his build. Something on a silver chain, a medallion of some sort, dangles just inside the first button of his shirt so I can’t tell what it is. His jeans are worn but, again, flattering, and they fit just so, and he’s wearing a scuffed pair of dark brown work boots. He has an expensive haircut with just a hint of sideburns. I realize that some thought went into this look. None of it is accidental. He wears a slim, tasteful silver watch on his wrist. My own collection of bangles and assorted woven leather bracelets looks cheap and ridiculous in comparison.

I excuse myself to the ladies’ room and lock the bathroom door behind me, and I look at my face in the mirror. My cheeks are flushed. I apply lip balm vigorously and try to smooth my ill-fitting sweater. God, it looks like something Shorty and Jam wouldn’t even bother with. I rake my fingers through my hair and take a good look at myself. The improvement is minimal.

When I arrive back at the table, Joel is on his cell phone. He flips it shut and lays it on the table. “Sorry, just checking my messages.”

I smile and shrug. What I wouldn’t give to hear those messages.

“So, you work every night, Allie?”

“No, not every night.”

“We should go out sometime. See a movie or something.”

“Yeah, we should.” Is he asking me out on a real date?

We talk some more, mostly small talk. I start to relax and I even laugh at some of his stories. He seems to have hundreds of them and he tells them in a way that makes you hang on every word. They often feature hilarious situations he’s been involved in where he admits that he probably should have known better and then he laughs softly. His life is vastly more interesting than mine but he has a way of looking completely engaged when I speak. Eventually, the waiter drops the check on the table. Joel picks it up and looks around.

“Hey, wanna drink and dash?”

“What?” Is he kidding?

“C’mon. It’d be so easy.” He leans in. “Ya think that old-fart waiter would even chase after us?”

I shake my head. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Of course.” He takes out his wallet and pulls out a five and a one and puts them down on the table.

Later, on my way home, I try to analyze what just happened. Why is it so difficult for me to decipher whether Joel likes me or not? I mean, didn’t he suggest a movie date and take down my phone number? And after we left the café, we were standing on the sidewalk and he said, “You’re an interesting girl, Allie.” And then he touched a strand of my hair that had fallen into my eye and gently pushed it aside. How am I supposed to interpret that? A part of me misses the mystery surrounding M. I’m glad that I know Joel now, but I’d become used to the fabricated story I’d created and I suppose I was a bit in love with it. Joel, the real M, is quite a different person, harder to figure out; even with all the great stories, you get the feeling he’s leaving something out, something big. He has this unexplainable thing that I’m incredibly drawn to, this daring, reckless, spontaneous side. You know that he’s the first one off the cliff at the swimming hole, the first to knock back a shot or throw a punch or lean in for a kiss. He’s the type of guy who’s always happy to take you up on a dare, always looking for adventure, never thinks too much about consequences. He has an easy confidence that leaves me breathless and wanting against my better judgment. I’ve never met anyone else like him.

W
ednesday’s blog is posted by nine a.m. the next morning. I woke up early, my head spinning with thoughts of Joel. I can’t stop thinking about him, and our time together comes back in sound bites and flashes of his hands, his smile, his clothes, his eyes. Since I was awake, I decided to get some work done.

The blog is about Mink DeVille.
Cabretta
(easy to find on vinyl) was their first commercial release. Willy DeVille, band founder and master of the New York ghetto love song (his version of “Spanish Harlem” is soul stirring), was a former all-star drug abuser, about seven feet tall with a reputation for being a real pain in the ass. He was the kind of rock star who could honestly take your breath away when he walked onstage. He’s famous for his exploration of Latin rhythms, mariachi, Creole, Cajun, blues, and R & B, and he had, in my opinion, one of the sexiest voices out there (with all due respect to Tom Waits). He lived in New Orleans some of the time, and I was convinced that he was a vampire until he died in August ’09. Some might remember him from the
Princess Bride
sound track. His song “Storybook Love” was the best thing about this beautiful Mark Knopfler sound track. I advise readers to get that too.

Inexplicably, my mom is going camping this weekend with Jack. She announced this in the morning before I left for the store. I detected some anxiety in her voice and she wouldn’t look me in the eye. My mom has never slept outdoors in her life. She told me that, when she was a kid, Estelle sent her to Jewish summer camp in upstate New York, claiming it would be an excellent “character builder.” The campers slept in log cabins on wooden bunk beds but, after three weeks of that, the counselors announced that they were taking the campers on an overnight camping trip in the woods. My mom panicked at the very idea of sleeping outdoors and she faked heatstroke to get out of it. The only person left at camp to watch her was the janitor, an alcoholic with very poor judgment who got my mom drunk on Budweiser. She also told my mom slurred ghost stories and then left her alone in the empty cabin for hours while she drove to the bar in town. My mom was terrified. Who wouldn’t be? Her story has all the elements of a classic slasher movie. She always tells that story when someone asks her if she camps, so I’m surprised she didn’t tell it to Jack.

Apparently, though, when Jack asked her, my mom somehow thought that by “camping” he obviously meant camping all day and sleeping in a lovely hotel at night with flush toilets and down quilts and four-hundred-thread-count sheets and mints on the pillows. I guess she thought that that’s how people over forty camp. Only later, when she’d already accepted, did she realize that when Jack said “camping,” he actually meant “camping.”

When I arrive home from work, my mom’s already in a tailspin over the whole thing. She can’t decide whether she should call it off and come clean with him or just go along with it and fake her love for the outdoors like she faked her cooking skills. I think it might be harder to fake your love for the outdoors. When I was a kid I belonged to the Firefly Girls; they’re like the Camp Fire Girls except they’re not run by right-wing Christians and they don’t worship God. Firefly Girls worship nature, so we did a lot of crafty, outdoorsy things with leaves and sticks. We called them “Blair Witch Projects.” At the end of the year, we went on an overnight camping trip called a “discovery.” The first thing I discovered was that I never want to sleep outside again. The second thing I discovered was that eating nine s’mores can make you barf.

I lie on the sofa while she reads to me from a book called
Poisonous Insects and Plants of Northern California
.

“Oh, here’s a nice one, the brown recluse spider. This one resides in wooded areas. In other words, next to my head while I’m sleeping. ‘In a small number of cases, a bite from the brown recluse can produce organ damage with occasional fatalities.’”

“That’s the worst-case scenario. How bad can it be? It’s called a ‘recluse.’”

“It’s been my experience that all recluses have a mean streak.” She flips through the bug-covered pages, grimacing at the photos.

I muse over the word
reclusive
. Am I reclusive? Am I hiding from the world behind my prized vinyl collection? Am I destined to become an old reclusive vinyl collector with a mean streak, waving my fist at the neighborhood kids with Janis Joplin playing in the background? Would Joel think I was pathetic if he knew how I lived?

I watch my mom, her brow furrowed, concentrating on her bug book. “Mom, why don’t you try being yourself with this Jack guy? Why are you suddenly some sort of Martha Stewart in a Girl Scout uniform?”

“Oh, it’s not that; it’s not that at all. It’s just that sometimes I wonder if maybe your dad was right. The academic life is starting to lose its appeal for me. Do I really want to spend my life hanging around with people who can quote Shakespearean sonnets? I don’t think it’s such a bad idea for me to try some new things. Anyway, at the very least, it’s healthy for me to step out of my little world. I’ve been living in a bubble.”

Her words aren’t lost on me. Maybe they apply to me too: different bubble, same problem. “Maybe you should bring your bubble camping. Is it bug-proof?”

She laughs. “Hey, what’s in your bag, anything for me?”

I dig through my messenger bag and pull out a Ray LaMontagne CD. “You’re going to love this guy.” I slide the CD into the player and get back on the sofa. The song “Be Here Now” starts and we lie there listening for a while. My mom never talks over new music. We’ve always been a household of respectful music listeners. When my dad left, it occurred to me that for years our family had communicated mostly by playing music for one another. It was great but we had no idea how to talk to one another. If I came home and heavy metal was playing with the volume turned up, it usually meant my parents had been fighting. If Neil Young or the Byrds or Greg Brown was playing, things were okay. If my mom was trying to torture my dad, she’d put Yoko Ono or Kate Bush on. If nothing was playing, no one was home.

After a couple of songs my mom nods at me.

“I like him. He sounds kind,” she says.

Between songs we realize that there’s someone knocking on the front door. I turn down the music and my mom goes to answer it.

Ravi is standing on our front porch, holding an enormous plant. He looks a little uncomfortable.

“Hi, Ravi,” says my mom, gesturing for him to come in. “I wasn’t expecting you today. I have us scheduled for tomorrow morning. Did I get that wrong?”

“No, no. It’s just that I was in the neighborhood and I thought I might stop by with a small token of my appreciation.” He hands her the plant and my mom stands there holding it for a few seconds and then she puts it on the floor next to her feet.

“Wow, it’s heavy. Thank you very much, Ravi.”

He smiles nervously.

“Hey, is that a new shirt?” she asks. I lean off the sofa to get a better look. He’s wearing an oxford short-sleeved button-down shirt in pale blue. The creases from the package it came in zigzag his chest. I also notice that his unruly beard has been trimmed close to his face and his hair has been cut about an inch. It makes him look much younger.

“Yes. You like it?”

“I do. You look very nice,” my mom says sincerely.

Ravi beams. “Thank you very much. Well, I won’t keep you any longer.”

“That’s okay. I’m not busy. Oh, while you’re here, I should tell you that I have to move our Monday appointment to the afternoon. Is that okay? I’m going camping for the weekend.”

Ravi’s face darkens a bit. “Yes, that’s fine. Camping?”

“Yeah, crazy, huh?” My mom runs her hands through her hair and lets it fall across her shoulders, a nervous habit she has. “I hope I don’t die out there.”

“Yes, well, then. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“Okay. Thanks for the plant. Bye, Ravi.” She closes the door and picks up the plant, looking around for a place to set it down. She finally gives up and puts it in the middle of the coffee table. She sits and we both look at the plant thoughtfully. Suddenly, my mom starts to laugh.

“What do you suppose that was all about?”

“You heard the man; he was in the neighborhood.” I smirk.

“God, I think he might even have been wearing cologne.”

“I think he’s sweet.”

“He is. Remind me to water that thing, would you?”

We watch the plant some more as though it might hop out of the pot any moment and do a soft-shoe on the coffee table.

“Do you think Ravi’s throwing his hat into the ring now that he knows I’m dating?” she asks, finally taking her eyes off the plant and looking at me.

“Not a bad theory, Einstein.”

My mom runs her fingers through her hair and looks at the plant again.

Thursday’s blog is about the Pogues, more specifically Shane MacGowan, the always inebriated Celtic rebel. The Pogues fired MacGowan, the founder of the band, in 1991, when they couldn’t deal with his drunken state anymore. Turned out they signed their own death warrant in the process. Fans weren’t interested in the Pogues without Shane. In the blog I advise that you should never buy a Pogues album unless he’s on it.

Friday’s blog is about the Gram Parsons album
Grievous Angel
. This was the first “country music” album I ever bought. It kicked my ass. Gram called it “cosmic American music.” It features a young Emmylou Harris on vocals at the start of her career. Gram died in 1973 in Joshua Tree, California, of a drug overdose. He was twenty-six years old. I told readers that if they don’t own this LP, they should find it, buy it and listen to “Hickory Wind” till they weep.

The top five LPs this week are:

• The Pogues:
  Rum, Sodomy, & the Lash
  
• (five out of five LPs)
  
• Gram Parsons:
  Grievous Angel
  
• (five out of five LPs)
  
• Neil Young:
  After the Gold Rush
  
• (five out of five LPs)
  
• Marianne Faithfull:
  Broken English
  
• (five out of five LPs)
  
• Emmylou Harris:
  Blue Kentucky Girl
  
• (four out of five LPs)
  

Within one hour of my posting, eighteen people posted comments on the Gram Parsons blog: people from Europe, some repeats from the other day; most of them live in Amsterdam, one guy from Norway and two people from Denmark. One girl from Vermont and a few people from the South. Most of them wrote about the first moment they heard Gram Parsons and the way it made them feel. One comment that stopped me in my tracks said:

Berkeley? Could it have been posted by Joel? Is it possible that he took my fanzine out of the bag and read it and that he knows it’s me? Who else could have sent it? Aidan? Then I remember that Zach took my zine the other day too, but that post just doesn’t sound like him.

The blog is taking up more and more of my time. On top of the actual writing, people are also sending me their addresses so I can send them a fanzine. The only way I can keep up is to work on it at Bob & Bob’s. I’m finding myself typing away madly whenever I get the chance. The zines at the store are steadily disappearing now. I never see anyone taking them but the stack keeps getting smaller and smaller. Are people actually reading it? I’ve noticed that whenever I work on the blog, I feel good. I don’t feel reclusive or weird. I feel like I’m doing something good for the world, gathering like-minded people together in solidarity. I often imagine all of the vinyl lovers I’ve amassed, standing together in a circle in the middle of a big field somewhere, and I would stand in the middle like an angelic cult leader, and we would all be smiling and feeling the love. Pretty cheesy, but there it is.

On Friday, as promised, I escort Kit to her appointment with the plastic surgeon. The barter system is alive and well in our friendship, so in exchange, I’ve asked her to spend the weekend at my house while my mom’s camping. The idea of rambling around the house all weekend with Suki, the ghost, and Pierre, the traitorous cat, for company isn’t very appealing. Kit’s agreed, saying that the change of scenery will probably do her good. She hasn’t stopped longing for Niles to appear on her doorstep, hat in hand, begging for forgiveness. She wouldn’t forgive him in a million years but it’s nice to be asked.

I left my mom to her precamping anxiety. She’d packed and unpacked and repacked several times. I informed her that she might not need two skirts or even one, for that matter, and a cashmere wrap was definitely out of the question. I told her she should stick to stuff that looked like “gear” but she looked confused. “Things with lots of zippers and Velcro and straps made of polar fleece or some sort of moisture-wicking fabric,” I told her. To her I was speaking gibberish. I loaned her a pair of cargo shorts and a hoodie and a down-filled vest and left her to figure out the rest for herself. I didn’t want to do the big good-bye because I thought it would just add to her anxiety if I acted as though I might never see her again.

Kit and I arrive at the plastic surgeon’s office just before two p.m. It’s on the seventeenth floor of a pretty deluxe high-rise office building with a gazillion-dollar view of the entire city and the bay. The furniture in the waiting room is high-end buttery leather in quiet earth tones that sighs when you sink into it and the walls are hung with giant black-and-white photos of women who would have you believe that they’ve altered themselves to perfection under the capable hands of Dr. Mayer when in fact they’re models in their early twenties with bodies like gazelles. There’s a glass fountain at one end of the large waiting room trickling water into a trough. No doubt the designer assured the doctor that it would be calming to his patients but all it does is make you have to pee. The unblinking receptionist has been nipped and tucked into an android and it looks like it might hurt for her to smile, so she doesn’t. Most of the patients waiting are women. They sit in the leather chairs looking like the victims of mortar attack. One part or another of their faces is wrapped in white gauze and some of them resemble mummies who’ve come partially unfurled. We’re the youngest people in the room but not by much. After Kit checks in with the stone-faced android we take our seats next to a young woman whose nose is taped up. Each of her eyes has a purple half-moon under it. She looks about twenty. No one in the room is making eye contact or talking with anyone else. There is no solidarity here. No one is trading war stories. Everyone is furiously flipping through magazines, so we follow suit. I select
Better Homes and Gardens
and Kit reads the
Economist
. Neither of us is really reading. The magazines are props so we can take in the room. I watch Kit peer over her magazine at a woman sitting across from us who looks like she’s in tremendous pain. She winces every time she moves. Kit leans over to me and whispers sagely, “Liposuction.” As the minutes pass I can sense Kit’s anxiety. She fidgets and sighs impatiently and sits at attention whenever a patient enters the waiting room from the consultation rooms beyond the frosted-glass door.