The Vinyl Princess (16 page)

“
Liar!
” I exclaim.

“That’s right. He’s trying to get me back while she’s still in the picture.”

“So what did you do?”

“I walked out. Then I remembered that my purse was still hanging on the back of the chair, so I walk back in and he’s sitting there, talking on his cell phone, and guess who he’s talking to?”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“’Cause I yanked it out of his hand and said, ‘Who’s this?’” And she said, ‘Who’s this?’ and I said, ‘Niles’s ex-girlfriend,’ and I flipped it shut and handed it back to him. Then I walked out for real.”

“Awesome.”

The waitress sets our food in front of us.

“Yeah, and you know what’s weird? I don’t feel so bad anymore. It’s like I just needed to have a moment like that so I could convince myself that I’m doing the right thing.” She takes a bite of her chickpeas and smiles at me confidently.

“That’s fantastic.”

“I know. So, anyway, I still have the money, and here’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking about buying a used car and you and I can do the road trip. How does that sound?”

“Great, but you don’t even have a driver’s license.”

“So I’ll get one. No big deal. In fact, we can both get one so we can take turns driving.”

I hesitate. “Okay . . . but . . .” I think about my blog. Would I be able to write it from the road? Maybe. Maybe I could blog about those indie record stores that Kit’s been talking about. I could talk about the LPs I pick up along the way. That might be a really cool feature.

“Look, it’s not like I’m leaving in the morning. We’ve got almost a year to plan it. Think about it. It’ll be great. We’ll
Thelma and Louise
our way across the country.”

It does sound fun, but there’s a lot that has to take place before we’re driving down the highway together, fancy-free, looking for adventure. So what’s the harm in saying yes? The cool thing about being best friends is that you can make big plans even if there’s only a slim chance in hell that they’ll ever happen.

“Okay, I’m in.” I smile.

Kit grins. “Cool.”

Z
ach’s mix brings me to my knees.

A couple of days after I completely insulted him, I’m at my computer, writing a blog about the sound track for
Paris, Texas
, by Ry Cooder, when it suddenly occurs to me where I put Zach’s CD: I slid it between the jazz and blues sections of my LPs because I knew that I’d lose it otherwise. I jump up from my chair and there it is. Right where I left it. I put it into my player and look at the case. There’s no song list; maybe that’s a test. He starts out with an R. L. Burnside tune, “Come on In,” all rich and bluesy and dripping with the South. Cut two is Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald singing “Under a Blanket of Blue.” Then he revs it up a bit with “Beer, Gas, Ride Forever” by John Doe and then it’s just one surprise after another: Elvis Costello, “Hidden Charms”; Crowded House, “Mean to Me”; John Lennon, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”; the Triffids, “Estuary Bed”; Joe Strummer, “Johnny Appleseed”; Ruthie Foster, “Runaway Soul”; the June Brides, “Every Conversation”; the Kinks, “All of My Friends Are Here”; Jesse Malin, “Brooklyn”; Joe Ely, “All Just to Get to You”; Ry Cooder, “Across the Borderline”; Tom Waits, “Green Grass”; the Frames, “Lay Me Down”; King Creosote, “Home in a Sentence”; Iggy Pop, “The Passenger”; Nick Cave, “God’s Hotel”; Johnny Cash “Sunday Morning Coming Down”; Junior Wells with Buddy Guy, “Mystery Train”; Small Faces, “Runaway”; Del Amitri, “Driving with the Brakes On”; Son Volt, “Tear Stained Eye”; the Music Lovers, “The Former Miss Ontario”; the Felice Brothers, “Frankie’s Gun”; and then, just when you think you can’t take it anymore, he finishes the whole thing off with “She” by Gram Parsons.

Just for the record, I’m a girl who considers herself the all-time reigning queen of the mix. My mixes are legendary but, I have to admit, not one of them even comes close to the CD Zach made for me. If I’d never met Zach before and I was handed the mix and told to listen to it, I would probably propose marriage, sight unseen, or I’d at least offer to be his girlfriend. I abandon the blog and listen to the CD over again with my eyes closed.

There’s that thing that can happen to you when you meet somebody and you don’t consider them extraordinary at all and then they do something like play the cello or write amazing poetry or sing and suddenly you look at them completely differently. That’s how I’m feeling about Zach right now. Then I feel a pang of guilt. I’m pretty sure that the reason he hasn’t been around the store is because I turned him down the other day. I guess he’s a lot more sensitive than I thought. He has to emerge sometime, though; I mean, where else is the guy gonna shop for that list of his, eBay? I have to figure out a way to smoke him out of his hole. I’m pretty sure now that he’s my Berkeley Fan. Maybe I can get to him through my blog. I quickly finish up the piece on
Paris, Texas
and then I write a blog extra: “The Art of the Mix”:

I list the cuts from the mix, and then I continue with:

On Sunday afternoon, the temperature rises and hovers in the mid-eighties. My mom and Kit and I decide to do what three women who find themselves in the humiliating position of being discarded by the respective men in their lives (sure, in my case it was never really “on,” but I still feel rejected somehow, not that I expect anyone to understand that) do: We decide to get ourselves to the beach and soak up some sun. The summer is slipping away from us and we haven’t so much as dipped our toes in the water.

We pack up my mom’s old Volvo with an umbrella, towels, food, drinks, books, sunscreen and an air mattress and drive off to Lake Anza, a tiny puddle of a lake with a sandy beach in the Berkeley Hills (now, this is my mom’s idea of camping: a hot shower in your own home at the end of the day to wash the sand from your various crevices). My mom steers the Volvo around the parking lot a couple of times before we spy a parking spot. A dilapidated VW van with a Deadhead sticker on its bumper is pulling out just as we round the corner. The park is packed with stroller-pushing, picnic-carrying, baby-juggling families, and the air smells of briny sunscreen and corn dogs. Boom boxes blaring hip-hop compete for airtime. We fight for position on the sand and unroll our towels and set up our umbrella. My mom digs into her book bag and settles in on her towel to read. Kit and I strip down to our bathing suits and carry the air mattress down to the shore. We inch our way into the chilly water and paddle the mattress out to the deep water, where it’s less likely to be contaminated by baby urine. Kit crawls onto the mattress and lies on her back. I dangle off the end of it like an outboard motor, kicking us in a wide circle. The noise from the beach echoes over the water to us: parents yelling at their kids, kids having water fights, the lifeguard yelling at the people who dare to swim outside the designated swim area. It all sounds so pleasant from out here, those sounds that are so specific to summer and water and beaches that you can’t help but enjoy them. A mother duck and her ducklings paddle past us, making sweet little quacking noises at one another.

“I’m so happy right now.” Kit sighs, looking up at the sky. “We never do this. How come we never do this?”

“I don’t know. Let’s come here as much as we can before the summer ends.”

“God, this has been one of the weirdest summers ever. Hasn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I look back at the beach, scanning it for our umbrella. My mom hasn’t moved.

“I wonder what Niles is doing today,” muses Kit.

“Probably sleeping off a hangover in that putrid cave of his.”

“Yeah, probably. That room was pretty rank, wasn’t it?”

“Very nasty.”

“I remember one time there was this lingering odor of rotting meat in there and we couldn’t figure out what it was. His mom went crazy and started threatening to throw him out, but about a week later he finally found a half-eaten submarine sandwich under his bed. It was all green. He thought it was a sneaker. Then he pretended he was going to eat it.”

“Ewww. That is
so
Homer Simpson.”

“Hey, there’s an upside I never thought of before. Maybe my next boyfriend won’t be a slob.”

“Maybe. Or maybe he won’t be an asshole. Okay, get off. It’s my turn to ride.”

“Five more minutes.”

I pull up next to her and flip the mattress. Kit tumbles into the lake and comes up sputtering and splashing.

“What the hell was that?”

“You looked hot.”

“That’s
so
mean.”

I scramble onto the mattress and she starts kicking from the end.

“This is hard. I can’t get any momentum.”

“Kick harder.”

“My foot just touched something slimy.” She peers into the green water. “Are there sharks in here?”

“Keep kicking. Sharks hate that.” I lie there and watch a bunch of cotton-ball clouds float across the sky, chasing one another in slow motion. Kit stops kicking and hangs off the back of the air mattress.

“I just peed,” she announces.

“You did not.”

“I did so.”

“That’s revolting.”

Back on the beach, Kit and I stretch out, exposing our extra-white skin to the sun for the first time all summer. It feels warm and delicious and we don’t care if we burn. My mom has fallen asleep with her book in front of her. That’s what you get when you read
Jewels of the Tsars: The Romanovs and Imperial Russia.
This is her idea of beach reading?

I dig into the food bag and pull out the grapes and watermelon slices and potato chips. We eat and watch people. My mom wakes up hungry and I pass her the snacks.

Now all three of us are watching people. I guess that’s what you do at a beach: You watch people; people watch you. Interesting.

A while later, a man in a black Speedo seems to appear from out of nowhere. He approaches the shore and strides confidently into the water up to his muscular calves and pulls a pair of dark swim goggles down over his eyes. From behind, he looks like a fitter version of Ravi. I look over at my mom. She’s watching him too. We’re all watching him. Just before the man expertly enters the water and swims away, he does a little half turn to each side to stretch his shoulders. My mom and I catch a glimpse of his profile. It
is
Ravi!

“Hey, isn’t that that Ravi guy your mom works for?” asks Kit, pointing.

“Yeah,” I reply, mystified. My mom and I look at each other.

“Wow, ‘Sporty Ravi,’” says Kit.

My mom shields her eyes from the sun and watches Ravi cut cleanly through the water, barely disturbing it, like he’s been swimming all his life.

“Are we sure it’s him?” she asks.

“Yeah. It’s him. Who knew that
that
was hiding under all the corduroy and tweed?”

“Gee, how long do you suppose he’s been doing this?”

“I dunno, maybe he’s always done it.” I watch Ravi turn around at the end of the swim lane and start back the other way.

“I had no idea.” She can’t seem to take her eyes off him. “We should have brought binoculars.”

“Mom, your mouth is open.”

“Do you think he’s seeing anyone?” asks Kit.

I glare at her. She looks at me and mouths,
What?

“We should go,” says my mom suddenly.

“Right now? Don’t you want to say hi?”

“Oh, no. He could be in there for hours.”

“No, he won’t, Mom; he’s not swimming the English Channel.”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to make him uncomfortable.”

I don’t think Ravi is the one who would be uncomfortable, but we pack up the towels and books and lower the umbrella and drag everything back across the sand to the parking lot.

“Hey, you know what we should do?” asks my mom as we walk back to the car.

“What?” I ask.

“We should have a barbecue!” she says, sounding like someone who’s had tons of them.

“Yeah! We should!” says Kit, a little too eager to start lighting fires at my house again.

On our way home in the car, the barbecue gets downsized to take-out pizza because we realize that we’re missing a few of the necessary components required for a barbecue, namely a barbecue. At first we entertain the idea of buying one, but we’re all sticky and wet, and shopping for a barbecue in wet bathing suits doesn’t sound very appealing.

After we unload all the wet beach stuff, I quickly run upstairs and check my blog. There’re a couple of comments, one about sound tracks; a couple of people have sent me their mix lists. Nothing from my Berkeley Fan.

Kit and I walk down to Arinell’s to get the pizza and my mom makes a salad and we put Nancy Sinatra and Brian Setzer on the stereo and talk with our mouths full and tell the worst jokes ever. After dinner, Kit goes home and I go upstairs and call my dad. He left a message on the machine while we were out that I should call. I try his cell first but he doesn’t pick up, so I dial his home number. Kee Kee picks up on the second ring. Her voice is thick, like she’s been sleeping with the phone next to her head. I ask her politely if my dad is there. Her voice gets all syrupy:

“No, honey. He’s not here. He went to band practice.”

“Oh, um . . . okay.” I decide not to confront her on what in the hell she means by that. “Could you tell him that I called?”

“Sure I will. Bye-bye.”

I click off the phone and sit there staring at it for a minute.

My dad’s in a band?

* * *

The last entry for sound track week is Peter Gabriel’s sound track for
The Last Temptation of Christ
, officially called
Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ
. This LP, when I heard it for the first time, turned me inside out. I actually wasn’t even a Peter Gabriel fan till I heard this. I post the blog but then I remember that I can’t close off the week without mentioning
Local Hero
by Marc Knopfler, beautiful, haunting Celtic music, some of Knopfler’s best work. I put that in as an afterthought and then I remember
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
sound track, by Ennio Morricone (sound track week wouldn’t be complete without it).

Still no comment from Berkeley Fan.