The Vinyl Princess (18 page)

I
n most places, the signs that summer is winding down are pretty much the same: The leaves start to turn, the nights get chilly and the days get shorter and shorter. In Berkeley, the most obvious and by far the most disturbing sign that summer is over is the sudden arrival of U-Hauls and storage containers. They materialize on the streets in front of student housing and apartment buildings like miniature villages. The locals are forced to swerve around the boxes like they’re part of an obstacle course. It’s only a matter of time before every seat in every café is filled with a laptop-gazing, mouse-clicking student and idle conversation becomes a thing of the past. I’m always a bit sad when this happens, mostly because the weirdos and eccentrics get homogenized by all the “normal”-looking students and Berkeley starts looking like anyplace else.

There’s no one in the store this morning so I have lots of time to work on my blog. I write a love letter to the Clash and post it.

Shorty and Jam drop by to change their panhandling coins into paper dollars. In celebration of the students’ return, Shorty is wearing a simple A-line skirt in taupe and Jam has a purple flower in his hair. They do their part in this transaction by separating the silver into separate piles of nickels, dimes and quarters for me to count, but they manage to get something sticky on every single coin, so I scrub down like a surgeon after they leave. A few seconds later, the phone rings. I grab it, happy for the distraction.

“Bob and Bob’s.”

“Why didn’t you call me back last night!” demands Kit.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry, I totally forgot!” I watch out the window as a minitwister of leaves skitters across the road.

“Okay, so are you ready for this? Auntie Depressant got a record deal.”

“Really? With who?”

“Ravage.”

“You’re kidding. Ravage is good. How did you find out?”

“Niles left a message on my cell last night. He said that he just thought I should know.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know, probably because he wants me to seethe.”

“Are you seething?”

“I won’t lie to you. I’m seething a little. I guess I should be bigger about it. He also mentioned that they might be touring with the Dropkick Murphys next summer. Crap! I guess I should call him back.”

“What for? He’ll just gloat. Don’t call him.”

“You know what? You’re right. I’m not going to call him. See? This is why I needed to talk to you.”

“You didn’t already call him, did you?”

“No. I swear I didn’t. I was six digits in a few times but I aborted the mission every time.”

“Good.”

“The dreaded students are back; have you noticed?”

“Yeah. I haven’t seen them in here, though. . . . Downloading bastards.”

“So this morning, I’m at Royal Coffee, running late as usual, and I’m in line behind this girl who’s dressed in J.Crew, head to toe, and she’s explaining to François, the owner, that he should carry low-carb bagels like they do in the coffee places in L.A. and he says, ‘This ain’t L.A.,’ and she goes on to order a mocha with whipped cream on top. She walks past all of us waiting in line in her plaid kitten heels like she owns the place. I was late for work because of her bullshit.”

“Nothing says ‘summer’s over’ like plaid kitten heels straight from the catalog. By the way, where are we eating lunch?” My stomach is already grumbling.

“Sanje’s back. We have to go over there.”

“He’s back? Is he okay?”

“I think he’s fine. I’m dying for a falafel.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Okay, so, don’t call Niles . . . right?”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Later, dude.” She hangs up.

Bob is out on the avenue doing something and I go back to the office to grab a new pad of credit slips. While I’m in there, I see this business card on his desk. It’s for one of those companies that sells stuff on eBay for you. I immediately think of the cheap-suit guy. I stand there for a moment, staring at the card, trying to put a scenario together in my head. What circumstances would lead Bob to a place where he’d need the services of someone like this? Is he selling some of the inventory? Why? I refuse to let my mind travel any farther down that road. I’m sure that if something’s up Bob will tell us soon enough. I mean, we deserve to know, don’t we?

I quickly glance around Bob’s desk and then I see something else. It’s Bob’s lease for the store. Why would he have it out on the desk like this? I open the office door a crack and check to see if Bob’s around. He’s not. I shut the door and grab the document. I read carefully through the front page, looking for a date that might tell me something. Then I see it; Bob’s lease is up at the end of October, approximately eight weeks from today. I feel like I just got punched in the stomach. The last thing I see on Bob’s desk, as I stagger out of the office, is my zine sitting on his desk, open.

I decide not to tell anyone about my discoveries. I could be wrong about everything. I sure hope I’m wrong about everything.

Fabulous Falafels is packed. Sanje is enjoying a level of fame that can be brought about only by blowing away a couple of bad guys Wild West style. The place is sparkling clean and there’s a lingering new-paint smell in the air. Kit and I get in line behind a bunch of new students who have no idea. They think that this line is all about the falafels and they’re only half-right. Sanje is working the counter and he plays down his role in ending the crime spree when his regular customers ask him about it. He shrugs and waves away their questions with his hand. I’m sure that if he didn’t think that the American government was monitoring his every move, he’d be riding an elephant up Telegraph Avenue right now, waving to the crowd.

I’m completely distracted by what I saw on Bob’s desk this morning. I can’t stop thinking about all the times he’s threatened to sell the store. We never took him seriously but maybe the robbery was the last straw. Kit and I get to the front of the line and I shove it to the back of my mind.

Sanje greets us with gusto. “Ladies, welcome to my grand reopening. Free falafel today for my loyal supporters.”

“Thanks, Sanje! What for?” I ask. Kit kicks me in the calf. She clearly doesn’t think we should question free food.

“I’m feeling especially grateful for what I have today.” He waves his arm around, indicating the restaurant, or maybe America.

We order and find two chairs outside on the tiny patio.

“Well, Sanje’s drunk with power,” says Kit, pulling open her handbag and putting her wallet away.

I sip my iced tea and shrug. “It’s not every day that you conquer the enemy.”

“So, guess what? I think I might have a date.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that there’s this guy; he works at the campus bookstore. . . . I know . . . big yawn, but he shops at the store. His taste in clothes is exquisite, and I’ve chatted with him a bit, you know, about this and that, mostly clothes and music, and he was in this morning, buying some tailored dress shirts, and somehow talk gets around to how I’m currently single. . . .”

“Somehow?”

“What? I’m not a nun. Anyway, he said we should get together sometime and I gave him my cell phone number.”

Kit’s phone starts to ring. Her ring tone is Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” She retrieves it from her bag and looks at the number and then she answers it, holding up her index finger in front of me.

“Hello?”

“Oh, hi, Nelson.” She mouths,
It’s him
, to me. She turns on her cute, sexy, boys-only voice.

Nelson?
I mouth back. She gives me the finger.

“Let me just grab my Day-Timer and see if I’m free.” She sits there, doing nothing, and lets a few seconds pass. “Good news, it looks like I can make it. . . . Okay. What time? . . . Right, I’ll meet you there. . . . Ciao.” She stretches this word into two long syllables.

She flips her phone shut. “Did I say I
might
have a date? I meant I
do
have a date.” She puts her phone away.

Sanje delivers our falafels himself. “Eat, eat!” he tells us, acting very much like Marlon Brando in
The Godfather.
We thank him again. He visits with some other tables on his way back inside.

“So, do you really like this Nelson guy or is this spite-dating?”

“No. I like him. He’s no Niles, I’ll give you that, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a bunch of Chelseas buzzing around him either.” She opens up her falafel and dumps a container of hot sauce on it.

I lower my eyes.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that. Do you think I was stupid enough to believe that Chelsea was Niles’s first? I’m not an idiot. I know there were lots of Chelseas. This one just happened to be the one that put me over the edge, that’s all.”

“It’s not like I knew anything,” I tell her, because I really didn’t. “I just suspected . . . you know . . . rock stars.”

“I know.” She frowns.

I tell her about my evening with Zach. How he stayed until midnight, sorting through my music collection and obsessing with me over who played in what band with whom before he/she was in this other band, pretty much the same thing I do with Bob except with Zach it felt like maybe there was an extra little something going on, a lingering look here, an arm brushing against an arm there. Kit wants all the details and she’s annoyed when there aren’t many. Anything short of ripping each other’s clothes off is disappointing to her. It’s hard to explain to her that obsessing over music with a guy is the height of excitement for me. She also wants to know if this Zach guy is a friend or a “friend.” She uses her fingers to mark quotations around the second
friend
. I scoff at her implication and tell her he’s just a friend, because I just can’t imagine him being anything else to me . . . that is, for now.

Kit leans back in her chair, luxuriating in the warm sun. The fog always disappears at the end of summer and we finally get real summer weather. “Can you believe that summer’s almost over? It felt like twenty minutes, didn’t it?”

“Ten.”

“Ugh. How shitty is it that we have to go back to school?”

“Supershitty.”

“How many days left?”

“Eleven and a half.”

“Let’s make every one of them special, okay?”

“Sure.”

After work today I’m going to Krishna to print the second official issue of my zine. It’s almost done and it now includes a bunch of new reviews and pieces I’ve written about my own vinyl finds
plus
a little cartoon about vinyl collectors drawn by Shep, from Virginia, who comments on my blog almost daily. I know that it’s going to cost almost twice as much to print the zines but I now have actual subscribers who sent me fifteen dollars each for a year’s worth of issues. I opened a bank account especially for my blog money.
Plus
, this little indie record company that distributes vinyl has been reading my blog and they asked me if they could put an ad in the zine and on my blog. I said sure. They’re sending me seventy-five bucks. Their ad will go right next to the Dean twins’ ad. I can’t wait to get the twins a stack of the new issue. This month’s color will be hot pink.

S
everal uneventful days pass with no sign of Zach—not on the phone, not in the store—and then my worst fear is realized: Bob & Bob is closing. After twenty-three years on Telegraph, Bob is finally closing his doors forever. He gathers Laz, Jennifer, me, Aidan and even Roger together in his office just before closing time to announce it to us. His eyes fill with tears and he has to stop several times and compose himself. He and Dao are planning to move into a condominium complex in Sarasota, Florida, where his aging mother lives. All Bob wants to do is fish. I never even knew he liked fishing. He’s never mentioned it once. You would think that in two years of talking to me about concerts, musicians, bands, rock stars, guitar licks and bass lines, he might have said just once that he liked fishing. Is it possible that he was doing all that for me? That he would have preferred to talk about fishing but he thought
I
wouldn’t ?

The cheap-suit guy is going to take all the high-end collectibles and sell them on eBay and the rest of the stock will be cleared out in a closeout sale, which starts tomorrow. The doors close in eight weeks, or whenever we run out of product, whichever comes first.

We’re all speechless, even Jennifer. Bob’s been talking about Florida and selling the place for so long that none of us believed that he would ever do it. Technically, he’s not selling it, though. He’s just going to disassemble it like an old Chevy, sell off the parts and let the rest of it rust away into nothing.

After I hear the news, I stand up, feeling dizzy and sick to my stomach. I walk out of the office before I fall apart. Sure, it’s sad that the world has no use for a record store anymore, and it’s sad that people think it’s okay to download their music off a computer without touching it or smelling it or holding it in their hands, but the saddest thing for me right now is that I feel like I’m losing the place where I live.

I walk slowly to the front of the store and then I gain momentum when I figure out that I need to get out of there. I grab my stuff and rush out the front door. Bob comes out after me but I don’t slow down. I don’t want him to feel bad; I don’t want him to see me fall to pieces and I make it only a block away from the store before that’s just what I do. I sit on the bench in front of the Holy Trinity Church and weep. I don’t care that the students walking past me stare at me curiously. This is partly their fault. They’re devoid of passion. They don’t even know that an era is ending while they bustle from class to class, listening to tinny-sounding crap on their iPods. Finally, I wipe my face on my sleeve and stand up.

The house is empty when I arrive home. I walk up the stairs heavily and fall onto my bed, my head at the foot end, looking up at my wall of LPs. Should I box them up and sell them to the Dean twins at the flea? Should I be moving on too? Is this a sign? Or will I carry them around with me the rest of my life from place to place, like family heirlooms that I can’t let go of?

I get up off the bed and go in search of the phone. I find it on the top stair and start to dial Kit’s number and then I think better of it. I go back into my room and locate the piece of paper that Zach left next to my turntable that night. His name and phone number are written in his neat hand. I dial the number. He picks up on the second ring. “Hello?” He sounds a bit out of breath.

“Hi, it’s Allie.”

“Hey, hi, are you okay? You sound like you have a cold.”

“No.”

“What’s up?”

“Bob’s is closing.” I squeeze my eyes shut.

“What? No way, really?”

“Really.” I inhale in quakes.

“Are you okay?”

“No.”

He pauses. “Uh, you want me to come over?”

“Could you?” I ask.

“Yeah, I just got out of the shower. I’ll dry off and come over.”

“Thanks.” I hang up the phone and watch a small black spider crawl up my wall. He’s rushing along as though something extremely important on the ceiling requires his immediate attention. I get up and walk into the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror. I’m badly in need of a haircut, my eyeliner is smeared and my nose is bright red. I wipe my face with a tissue and click off the light.

Zach arrives, out of breath, fifteen minutes later. His hair is still wet from the shower and it lacks vertical clearance. The damp clumps of hair sticking to his head make his face look softer somehow. He follows me up the stairs to my bedroom. I sit on the edge of the bed and he sits down next to me. He puts his arm around my shoulders and I remember the day after the robbery when he squeezed my shoulder and it made me feel better. It’s not working today. My eyes well up with tears again. Zach hands me his white handkerchief. I hesitate.

“Take it,” he says. “It’s clean.”

I blow my nose as ladylike as possible. His hankie smells like soap.

“How do you feel?” he asks me.

“I feel like my favorite uncle just died. No, I feel like my favorite person just died.”

He pats my shoulder like a big brother.

Somehow, we end up lying side by side on my narrow bed, not talking, listening to Billie Holiday sing mournfully on the stereo, our hands turned out toward each other, fingertips barely touching. I’m exhausted.

The sun drops out of the sky and darkness slowly makes its way across my bedroom and I drift off to sleep.

When I wake up, it takes me a second to remember why I’ve been sleeping in my clothes on my bed. The day’s events come back to me and my heart does a nosedive. The house is quiet except for the continuous sound of the needle hitting the end of the record. A dog barks somewhere in the neighborhood. My eyes adjust to the darkness and I look over at Zach. He’s snoring softly. He’s taken his glasses off and they’re sitting on the little table next to my bed. Without his glasses, his dark eyebrows become the focus of his face. I prop myself up on my elbow and trace one of them with my finger. He jerks awake.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Did I fall asleep? Was I snoring?”

“No, it’s okay.”

He feels for his glasses and puts them on slightly askew. He focuses on my face.

“Are you okay?”

“Better.”

“Wow, you look so beautiful when you’re sad.”

“Do not.”

“I suppose it would be completely inappropriate if I kissed you right now.”

“Yes, completely.”

He leans in and presses his lips against mine. It’s a soft kiss, not one of those long, lingering, romantic kisses and certainly not one of those adolescent kisses where you suddenly have someone’s tongue in your mouth followed by hands everywhere, groping awkwardly. I think that this kiss is a kiss with a future.

My mom arrives home and is curious to know what I’m doing in my darkened bedroom with a guy. She seems relieved when we emerge fully dressed and she gets a look at Zach, who doesn’t exactly look like a rapist, skulking out next to me in his rumpled clothes, trying to tame his hair, which has dried into a full-on fright wig.

I say good-bye to Zach at my front door and he says he’ll call later. I tell him he better, or else. I fill my mom in on the demise of Bob’s and start to cry all over again. I haven’t forgotten that tomorrow is registration for high school and I’ll be arriving with pink, swollen eyes, looking like I spent the summer sobbing in my bedroom. It’s bad enough that I have to go at all. School seems pointless to me now.

My mom tries to console me about Bob’s but the truth is, she never really understood why I wanted to spend my days in a dusty little store that smells like mildew, and I’m sure that she’s secretly pleased about the whole thing. Plus, she appears to be completely in love with Ravi. It’s taking up all her brain space. They’ve spent almost every moment together since their first date. They do everything but work on Ravi’s book. They’re like irresponsible teenagers. At the rate they’re going, that book will never get published and my mother might well be responsible for Ravi missing out on a Nobel Prize. Fortunately, Ravi’s back teaching school in a couple of days and my mom might blow the dust off her dissertation and actually get some work done. I’m really happy that my mom ended up figuring out that the person for her was sitting two feet away from her. I’m even happier that she doesn’t have to go back to the internet, but the other night I got up to go to the bathroom and bumped into Ravi in the hallway in his underwear. He was horrified and I’m still traumatized. My mom acted like it was nothing when I told her the next morning. She actually laughed.

Zach calls me later that night just like he promised. My heart jumps a little at the sound of his voice, surprising me.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Yes. Stop asking me that. It is what it is. Bob’s is done. It’s all over and I just have to deal.”

“Right, okay, so we’re in recovery mode now?”

“Whatever.”

“Hey, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Why is it called Bob and Bob Records when there’s only one Bob?”

“Back when Bob decided to open the store, he was going through a phase. He thought that the only music worth listening to was Bob Dylan and Bob Marley and while he was in some sort of drug-induced state he decided that he was going to open a record store that only sold Dylan and Marley and he’d call it Bob and Bob’s. Well, naturally when he came to his senses, he realized what a stupid idea that was but he still liked the name a lot, so he went with it.”

“So Bob is actually neither of the Bobs?”

“That’s right.”

“Interesting. Hey, but what about the blog?” he asks.

“Are you kidding me? The Vinyl Princess lives on.”

“Good. The Vinyl Princess rocks.”

“Yeah.”

“Cool . . . and the zine too, right?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Well, if you ever need a writer . . .”

“Seriously? You’d write for me?”

“Hell, yes, in a heartbeat. I love that stuff.”

“I may take you up on that; it’s kind of getting away from me.” I remember that the latest hot-pink issue of my fanzine is still sitting in a box next to my bed.

“Hey, when do you go back to school?” he asks.

“I’m not going. I’ve decided to run wild, start my own pirate ship or something.”

“Really?”

“I wish. I register tomorrow. School starts in a week. Oh, God, then I have to think about a new job.” I sigh heavily.

“I start school tomorrow,” he offers, and I realize I should have asked.

“Are you nervous?”

“Nah. I’ve got my new
Star Wars
lunch box jammed with peanut-butter sandwiches. What could possibly go wrong?”

“Everything is different now, just when I wanted everything to stay the same.”

“No, you didn’t. You just think you did because it felt safe.”

I guess he might be right about that. Bob & Bob’s was my safe place to hide from the world. All my best friends lived there but I guess I always knew better than to think that I could do this forever. You can’t hide from the world in a record store. And the blog, and everyone out there who reads it? They’re my new family. I have “people” now. I have a responsibility to them. The blog must go on.

Zach and I stay on the phone for an hour and before we hang up we make plans to see each other the next day. I have no idea how I came to be excited about the prospect of spending time with someone like Zach. These are the things in life that you have no control over. One minute you’re annoyed as hell at someone; the next minute you’re thinking romantic thoughts about them. Life can be funny that way.