The Vinyl Princess (19 page)

A
fter registration, the precursor to another year of hell, I arrive at Bob’s in time to watch Laz and Bob tape giant yellow-and-red banners to the inside of the store windows announcing, EVERYTHING MUST GO. When they’ve finished, the outside of the store looks like a furniture clearance center; all the cool stuff in the windows is covered up by the banners. Bob & Bob’s personality is about to be liquidated.

Bob has cherry-picked the bins and taken out most of the collectibles for the cheap-suit guy to auction off on eBay. The boxes sit at the front of the store, ready and waiting. What’s left has to be marked down. Bob and I, armed with price guns loaded with red sale stickers, go through the bins, one by one, reducing everything to rock-bottom prices. I apologize to my friends as I go, whispering to them that they’re worth more, that this isn’t their fault. Some of them I rescue, spending my last paycheck on them. Bob ran a big ad in three different papers and twenty-three years’ worth of customers start to trickle back in to scoop up a piece of Bob’s before it disappears forever. Some of them I don’t recognize; some I do. I want to ask every one of them the same question: “Where in the hell have you been?”

The mood changes from hour to hour. What starts out dismal quickly turns into a happy reunion as musicians, collectors and assorted music lovers from all over the Bay Area arrive to pay homage, show some solidarity, offer condolences, glance at the casket and take home some great deals. Bob holds court through it all. He almost seems to have been reinstated as the Mayor of Telegraph Avenue, shaking hands, hugging old customers, wiping away a tear, kissing babies, petting dogs and talking about the good old days. A few newspaper reporters arrive to interview Bob. He’s only too happy to relate the story of the end of the record store as we know it. Later that afternoon, a van from the local TV station pulls up and Bob stands in front of the store in a Marley T-shirt and sunglasses and tells the perky blonde holding the microphone who’s probably never even laid eyes on an LP that music has gone the way of food. People want it fast and cheap and they don’t care what it tastes like or where it comes from.

I arrive home exhausted. I’m grimy and I need a shower. I can’t imagine eight more weeks of this, but starting next week, I’ll be back to part-time till the end of Bob’s. On the dining room table there’s a note from my mom, held down with a used coffee mug. There’s a trace of lipstick on the rim. Hers, a new shade of pink. It’s the least she can do for someone who reinvented himself.

Estelle, as a rule, does not come for dinner. My mom must be debuting Ravi in his new starring role as her boyfriend. Estelle will be thrilled. She adores Ravi. Even with the crumbs in his beard she was crazy about him. I go upstairs and put Zach’s mix on loud while I undress. I walk past Suki’s room. The door is wide-open. I stand in the doorway looking in. The room is completely empty except for a bright red fire extinguisher sitting in the middle of the floor. Next to that, Pierre is sleeping curled up on a little oval cat bed that I’ve never seen before. He opens one eye and regards me for a second and then he shuts it again. Is it possible that all we needed to do to win him over was buy him a cat bed?

After I get out of the shower, I turn down the music and I dial Zach’s number, which I’ve now memorized. He picks up on the ninth ring when I’ve almost given up.

“Hey, what are you doing? It rang forever.” I hear music playing in the background . . . it’s Whiskeytown.

“Sorry. I put my phone in the kitchen cupboard by accident while I was cleaning and then I couldn’t find it.”

“Oh. How was school?”

“Not bad . . . well, actually, I sort of hated it. Plus, I got lost twice and I was late arriving to a seminar. My classes are miles apart. I think I may have crossed a state line. It’s an endurance test just to get there. Oh, and the students are a bunch of Philistines, and one of my professors has horrible body odor. He smells like fried onions but more acrid.”

“Ewww.”

“Don’t worry about it, though; things wouldn’t be any different at NYU. How was Bob’s?”

“Unbelievable. Sort of like a Woodstock reunion but sadder.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, Wavy Gravy’s coming at the end of the week and Bob’s on the six-o’clock news.” I look at the clock next to my bed. “In fifteen minutes.”

“I don’t have a TV.”

“That’s okay. It would only depress you. Hey, do you want to come over for dinner?”

“Um, okay. I could get into a home-cooked meal.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There will definitely be food but it definitely won’t be home-cooked.”

“This isn’t the official ‘meet the parents’ dinner invitation, is it?”

“No. It’s the official ‘meet my mother, her new boyfriend and my weird grandmother’ dinner. But they don’t know I’m inviting you, so just try to blend in. Come over in half an hour, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and don’t use the word
grandmother
around my grandmother. She hates that.”

“Got it.”

I hear the front door open and my mom’s voice, then Ravi’s. I get dressed and go downstairs. My mom and Ravi are in the kitchen, looking like they just got back from Saint-Tropez. My mom is wearing a cotton sundress and sandals and her cheeks and shoulders are a bit pink. Ravi’s wearing cargo shorts and a tank top. He looks like a J.Crew model.

“Hi, honey. Did you get my note?”

“Yeah. Hi, Ravi.”

“Hello, Miss Allie.” He still can’t quite look me in the eye after the underwear incident the other night.

“Ravi, it’s been a while. You practically live here. I think we can drop the ‘Miss.’ What do you think?”

“Yes, of course, you’re right.”

My mom looks away. I know it’s killing her not to somehow tie this into an underwear joke.

“Mom, Zach’s coming to dinner too, okay?”

“The guy from the other night?” She grins. “Sure.”

I wish she would stop acting like Zach is such a nerd that he couldn’t possibly be anything to worry about. I realize that going from M to Zach is rather a large leap in the complete opposite direction, but I’m sure that Zach has a dangerous, unpredictable side that I have yet to discover. Maybe one day I’ll walk in on him listening to Throbbing Gristle or something crazy like that.

My mom and Ravi get to work emptying a grocery bag onto the counter. Ravi wants to know all about the demise of Bob’s and I fill him in while my mom rinses lettuce in the sink for a salad.

“Is that all we’re having?” I ask her.

As if in answer to my question, Estelle pushes open the front door with her foot. Her arms are loaded down with bags. Estelle’s not much of a cook either but her takeout skills are masterful.

“I’ve got chicken; I need help!” she calls out.

Ravi rushes to help her, taking the bags. She gets a good look at him. “My God, Ravi, you look fabulous. Did you get an extreme makeover?”

“Estelle, cut it out,” scolds my mom.

“What’d I do?” She shrugs. “C’mere, Allie.” She bear-hugs me and kisses my cheek loudly. “Can you fix me up with a glass of wine, sweetie? It’s in one of the bags.”

I root around and find the wine opener and glasses while Estelle pulls Ravi over to the sofa and engages him in conversation, making it abundantly clear that she approves of this union. I open the wine and pour two glasses, setting them down in front of her and Ravi. She’s already deep into it with him: something about agrarian cultures versus nomadic cultures, specifically Mongolian nomads with regard to environmental sustainability.

I shove the crap to one side of the dining table and set five places. My mom puts the food out in the containers it came in. There’s no pretending here; we all know who she is. Zach arrives and I introduce him to Estelle, who smells New Yorker on him. She abandons Ravi and commences interrogating Zach about his “people.” New Yorkers have this thing where they can move across the country and stay there for twenty years but they still consider their New York address home. Turns out that Estelle and Zach lived a short fourteen blocks away from each other in Manhattan and further questioning reveals that Zach’s mom and Estelle belonged to the same Y, and if that’s not enough, they both swam in the pool at the Y on Wednesday mornings during free swim. It’s entirely possible that they passed each other in the water. They’re practically sisters. I’m not involved in this conversation so I put on some music, a nice mix of world, specifically Césaria Évora, Ry Cooder’s
A Meeting by the River
and some easy jazz.

When we sit down to eat, everyone is too engrossed in conversation to notice Zach lining up his silverware at right angles and finishing one type of food entirely before moving on to the next. He also wipes his hands on his napkin incessantly, as though he’s trying to remove an imaginary stain.

Ravi asks me if I’ll be looking for a new job now that Bob’s is closing.

“Bob’s is closing?” asks Estelle, the way you would ask if rain is expected that day.

“Yes,” I say. “Forever.” I try to sound dramatic.

Estelle, never without an opinion, gives us her take on the whole thing.

“You know,” she says, picking a piece of chicken out of her teeth, “I used to save everything: ticket stubs, greeting cards, birth announcements, invitations, corsages, playbills, and then, one day, after three marriages, I’m moving into a new condo clear across the country and I say to myself, ‘Estelle, what is all this stuff? It’s an old pile of paper and dried flowers. It means nothing. The memories are all up here.’” She points to her forehead. “These record stores, they’ve gone the way of the dodo bird. No one wants to carry those big LPs around anymore. The world has moved on. Out with the old, in with the new. You should get rid of all those records and get yourself a nice iPod, honey. You can put all your music on it. They’re fantastic.” She sits back and wipes her hands on a napkin, her point made. Zach looks across the table at me and rolls his eyes.

Halfway through dinner, Pierre appears at the top of the stairs, watching us a moment. Then he slowly descends like royalty deigning to move among the commoners. He pads over to the sofa and leaps up to the spot that Estelle recently vacated. He curls up and closes his eyes. My mom and I look on, amused. I guess we’re better than nothing.

When it’s time for Zach to leave, Estelle hugs him and kisses him hard on the cheek like he’s her long-lost grandson. She’s already invited him to attend a lecture series she’s organized out at the compound and he’s graciously accepted, schedule permitting.

Ravi follows shortly after. His classes start in the morning and he has to work on his syllabus. Estelle leaves too, reminding us that she brought the food so she shouldn’t have to help clean up.

My mom and I sit on the sofa next to Pierre, who seems mildly annoyed at first but stays where he is. I find the remote and turn on our tiny TV in time to catch the ten-o’clock news. They rerun the Bob & Bob story. We watch Bob, standing in front of those stupid banners, speaking into a microphone held by the reporter with her dyed blond hair and her overwhitened teeth. Bob’s shoulders are stooped and he looks defeated as he explains about record stores dying out across the country and how it’s become impossible to make a living selling music. Shorty and Jam appear behind him, hyperaware of the camera, wearing black cocktail dresses and black armbands in solidarity. They stand solemnly side by side, like funeral attendees, nodding in agreement with Bob and waving drunkenly to the camera. The reporter finishes with Bob and the camera zooms in tight on her face.

“Well, Janet, I guess that means we’ll all have to download our music now. You heard it right here in Berkeley. Record stores are a thing of the past.” She says it with a smile, like she’s describing something new and minty fresh.

The camera cuts back to Janet, the anchorwoman.

“I guess so, Diane. I’ll have to get my son to teach me. He’s a computer whiz and he’s only eight!” She chuckles and they move on to the next story.

I turn off the TV and my mom and I get up and start to clean up the remains of dinner.

I
’ve been avoiding Bob’s for weeks, taking a different route to school, pretending that the events of the summer haven’t altered me, but I finally got up the nerve to walk past it today on my way home from school. Clouds are bunching up in the sky and rain can’t be too far off. Approaching Bob’s, it feels like I’m visiting someone for the first time in a graveyard after I’ve buried them. I’m not so keen to see it in its new “condition.” There’s a big for lease sign in the window with the Realtor’s name and number on it. I peer into the darkened windows at the empty space. With all the bins taken out it looks pretty big in there. Years of concert posters are still plastered all over the walls. I know each one by heart. The emptiness of the place overwhelms me with sadness. I stand there with my forehead pressed against the grimy glass for a while.

A lot of homeless people have taken up residence in front of the store. There’s no one to tell them to move along and the wooden overhang keeps the sun off them. Among them, sitting on the pavement with their backs against the empty store, I see Shorty and Jam. They’re in rough shape. Their eyes are glassy and unfocused and they don’t even recognize me. They’re wearing stained jeans and T-shirts, nothing pretty from the free box. Cool nights and rain lie ahead, and being homeless on famous Telegraph Avenue will probably start to lose its appeal.

I saw Bob one more time just before he left for Florida. He was at the post office putting in his change of address. Dao had already gone down there to start getting them set up. He looked happy to see me. We stood there for a few minutes and talked about the new life he was heading to and I wished him well and told him that I hope he catches a lot of fish. For a second there it looked like we might start up a good “blah, blah, blah, fill in band,” but it never happened. I watched him walk toward his old van and I felt like I might sit down and cry but then it passed. I was okay.

After Bob’s closed, the only half-decent job I could find was at a coffee bar across from campus run by a crazy Italian guy named Agostino. He taught me how to pull a good strong espresso and foam the milk perfectly. The place is really busy and I barely get a moment to catch my breath during a shift. The tips are lousy too. Zach has deemed it filthy but he still comes to visit me whenever I’m working. There are two almost cool things about the job. One is that I get to pick the music we play. The other is that Agostino lets me distribute my zines there, not as ideal as a record store but they’re getting out into the world. Some of my old Bob & Bob’s customers come in from time to time but we hardly ever talk about music.

Kit still works at the vintage-clothing store. She sees Nelson but she’s quick to tell you that she’s not in love, and she doesn’t call him her boyfriend even though he calls her his girlfriend. She says she’s not ready for anything heavy right now so he just has to deal. She spends a lot of time planning our road trip in the not-too-distant future and she’s all signed up for driving lessons.

My mom and Ravi are madly in love.

My dad quit Hong Kong High after only three gigs. He said the final straw was when the bass player barfed into his kick drum after a gig just because it was round and looked vaguely like a toilet. He picked up a gig playing in a backup band for a jazz singer who works in casino cocktail lounges and fancy nightclubs around northern California and Nevada. Her name is Leona Miles. She’s fifty-seven.

Kee Kee is due in the spring. My dad will be a father for the second time in his life . . . that we know of.

I rarely think about M/Joel/William anymore, but when I do, I try to think of him not in a jail cell but living the life I imagined for him in South Carolina with his big happy family and his dog. I hope he’s sitting on a wooden porch swing writing in a journal or maybe reading his way through the classics. The other day I came across the drawing of him that the sketch artist copied for me that day at the police station. I decided that it was time to throw it away. I really hope M gets another chance at his life.

Pierre has started sleeping on my bed at night. We jockey for position and I usually end up clinging to the edge while he sprawls out luxuriously. He seems to be over the whole Suki thing, but if he could talk he would probably say, “I miss her.” But then if he could talk, he probably could have talked her out of leaving.

Akiko has added a lively element to our household. She owns more beauty supplies than Paris Hilton and she has her own extensive collection of CDs. She constantly dazzles us with her wardrobe choices, and her shoe and boot collection should be in a museum. She also doesn’t seem to mind the mess but she does insist that we vacuum from time to time to keep Pierre’s dander to a minimum. She’s learned to say the word
allergic
really well. The vacuuming has reunited us with a lot of lost items.

Zach and I are moving tentatively toward something that could be conceived of as a relationship if you don’t look too closely. We see each other whenever we can and, while he may not be Joey Spinelli or M/Joel/William, Zach knows a thing or two about the female anatomy. Who knew that Zachary Joseph Zimmerman, a totally neurotic, skinny nerd with OCD, could have me sighing with pleasure? He also has a way of making me feel beautiful, and let’s face it: He’s seen me at my worst. We openly admit that our love for each other is primarily based on the fact that we’re the only two people we know of who can talk about music for fourteen hours straight and wake up in the morning ready to start all over again.

My blog is going strong. I’ve had over forty thousand hits, and a steady stream of new readers arrive daily, and Elliot and I are designing a
Vinyl Princess
T-shirt. A few days ago, I got an email from this guy who runs a couple of big-time music blogs with tons of ads on them. He told me that he’d been reading my blog and watching it explode and he wanted to know if I was interested in selling it to him and I could still write it. He called it a “partnership.” He said it could be a real moneymaker if we sold some ads on it. I deleted the email. There’s only one Vinyl Princess.

The day that Bob finally closed Bob & Bob’s for good, Zach and I took a blanket and we hiked up the long hill to the Lawrence Hall of Science and sat on a bluff watching dusk fall over all of Berkeley and the bay beyond that. It was a clear autumn night, the first of many to come. We didn’t say much. Lights started to come on below us and stars flickered into the sky. The neon sign at Bob & Bob’s stayed dark for the first time in twenty-three years. Zach took my hand in his.

“You got a blog figured out for tomorrow, Veep?” he asked. He calls me Veep now, short for Vinyl Princess.

“Bob Dylan,
Nashville Skyline
, and Bob Marley,
Uprising
.”

Zach nodded. “Cool.”

Eventually, a chill crept over us and we folded up the blanket and made our way down the hill together in the dark.

That night I finally finished Zach’s mix CD, and I was right: It blew his mind.