Old Records Never Die (12 page)

Well, no, not exactly. The song I was playing when I lost my virginity was the Pixies' “Gigantic.” (Nothing about that was a pleasant memory.) “Dweller on the Threshold” was playing when I realized that sex could be fun. When I was like, hey, this is something I want to do again. As soon as possible. Her name was Susan S. She was blond and pale-skinned, with a voice colored with a slight smoky rasp, like she'd smoked just the right amount of cigarettes. It wasn't her idea to put on
Beautiful Vision
. That was my doing. But she didn't object. She just went with it. She didn't even seem perturbed when I stopped, mid-lovemaking, and crawled over to the record player—which, like my futon, was on the floor—and moved the needle back to track three, cueing up “Dweller on the Threshold” for a second time.

When you think sexy songs, you think Marvin Gaye cooing about getting it on, or D'Angelo asking you how it feels. Not an old fat Irish guy singing about angels and mighty crystal fires. There is nothing even remotely dirty about that.

Which may've been why I liked it. There was a safety in Van's gentle warbling and muted trumpets. It was like rolling up in a down comforter. And after my first few experiences having sex—which were accompanied by shrieking Pixies songs, perfectly mirroring the mood—I needed something that was soothing and reassuring. Something that said, “It's almost entirely unlikely that this woman is going to bite down so hard on your shoulder blades that you start bleeding all over the sheets.” (Which may or may not be a hypothetical.)

At some point during our lovemaking, Susan started laughing. I think it was the fourth time I'd replayed “Dweller on the Threshold,” and she was starting to actually pay attention to it.

“Are you okay?” I asked. Laughter really wasn't the reaction I was aiming for.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” she said, wiping away tears. “You just have such a serious look on your face. And this song . . .” She laughed again, like a snorting trumpet. “Are you listening to this?”

“What's wrong with it?” I asked, but now I was laughing too.

“‘Let me pierce the realm of glamour'?” she said, repeating one of the song's less sexy lines. “Really?”

We fell into each other's arms laughing. And then fucked ourselves silly, peaking somewhere in the “mighty crystal fire consuming his darkness” part.

When I saw that album again in the Ann Arbor store, without actually looking for it, just stumbling upon it by accident—which is the best way to find anything, but especially music—I knew it was mine. There was no question. Right there on the cover, there was a sticker, half ripped off, which read
RECKLESS RECORDS
. Actually, it read
LESS CORDS
, but you didn't have to be a crime scene investigator to put those missing pieces together. I'd bought my
Beautiful Vision
from Reckless in 1990. I don't remember where I sold it, but Ann Arbor was on the short list of suspects.

There was no other explanation! Unless there was another human being who went to Reckless Records in Chicago and bought the only Van Morrison record that almost nobody remembers or wants and took it across state lines to sell it to a college-town record store in Michigan, 240 miles away, which just coincidentally happened to be a short drive from my mom's house. I bought it and took it back to Chicago, along with a handful of other records that I'd picked up just out of nostalgia. (Billy Joel's
Glass Houses
, Pearl Jam's
Vs
., the Violent Femmes' debut.) I was barely in the door before I'd pulled out the vinyl and laid it down on my brand-new record player, which had just arrived from Amazon.

It was a Crosley three-speed turntable, with a built-in CD and cassette player, and constructed from the finest paprika-colored hardwood. It was absolutely nothing like anything I'd ever owned, and I hated it.

I'd owned exactly two record players in my life, and I've romanticized them both entirely out of proportion. The first one, acquired when I was only six, was a piece-of-shit plastic thing, made by Fisher-Price or Tele-tone or some company whose name has never been in any way synonymous with “sound quality.” But just like kids who grew up in poor families never remember themselves being poor, I was completely satisfied with my puke-green plastic record player. I had no idea that I was basically listening to all treble and the sound quality was just a notch above CB radios.

I shared that record player with my brother until the mideighties, when I finally got around to buying a proper sound system, with a separate turntable, amplifier/preamp, and speakers as big as steam trunks. The turntable was a Luxman PD272, and it looked like something Flash Gordon would have in his bedroom. It was all silver, thinner than a Sunday newspaper, with a glass dustcover that looked like a spaceman's helmet. It had an integrated tonearm. I don't know
what that is, but I remember the sales guy at Audio Consultants in Evanston—who zeroed in on me like shark to chum—mentioning its integrated tonearm, and how the technology was so advanced and unlike anything I could imagine—he made it sound like one of those robotic arms that does heart surgery—and it'd change the way I listened to music forever.

He told me that the Luxman PD272 could reach shimmering highs. He used that exact word,
shimmering
, which really stood out for me. Shimmering sounds like something that happens when angels hover over you, all gangbusters to tell you about the messiah. It also had exceptionally good
wow and flutter
. I had no idea what either of those things were, but they sounded important.

The Crosley was a poor substitute. But it was cheap, and buying one didn't involve getting into bidding wars I didn't have the deep pockets to win. I just wanted something that played records and had relatively decent sound and could be delivered in less than forty-eight hours.

“I've never heard of this one,” Kelly said, as she studied the
Beautiful Vision
cover. “Is it a bootleg or something?”

“It's an acquired taste,” I said.

She and Charlie had joined me in the office for a listening party. Which was both sweet and very, very awkward. When “Dweller on the Threshold” came on, Charlie started dancing, flailing his arms as he hip-thrusted around the room to his own tempo. Kelly laughed and hummed along with the two-note trumpet part. I smiled with a tight grin and tried to pretend like it wasn't completely unsettling watching my three-year-old son do a silly interpretive dance to a song whose only other association for me was those three months in the early nineties when I was having regular wild-monkey sex with a sexy blonde on a busted-ass futon.

“I mean, Van Morrison has done so many better albums,” Kelly
went on. “What's so special about this one? It sounds like a lot of new age dreck.”

The smart thing to do in this situation would've been to make up some innocuous story about how my grandmother had owned it, and how it always reminded me of winter visits down to Florida, sitting on her front porch and peeling oranges. But I told her the truth. Kelly just nodded. She didn't look upset, just a little rattled. It's one thing to say, “This song reminds me of an ex-girlfriend.” It's quite another to say, “This song reminds me of making love to an ex-girlfriend, so of course I have to own the song, so I can hear it again and again, remembering all of those great memories of putting my penis inside a woman who isn't you.” (That wasn't exactly how I phrased it, but it might as well have been.)

“Is this the same girl whose phone number is on that Bon Jovi record?” she asked.

“What? Oh, no, no, that's a totally different girl.”

I'd forgotten about
Slippery When Wet
. I hadn't tried calling the phone number written on the jacket yet, because I was positive she wouldn't answer, and I'd just end up talking to some old guy who'd swear he had this phone number since the sixties, and there wasn't any chance a teenage girl named Heather might've lived there at some point. The odds were stacked too heavily against me, and I just wanted to hold on to that illusion for a little while longer.

“So this whole experiment in finding your old records,” Kelly said, “it sounds like it's really about your ex-girlfriends.”

“That is ridiculous!” I protested.

“I'm not jealous; it's just interesting. Do any of these records you want have stories that don't involve women you've slept with?”

It wasn't all about that, I told her. Not by a long shot. What about my
Frampton Comes Alive!
? That wasn't about a girl at all. I was way
too young. My most visceral memory about that album involved a dead cat.

I remember my parents telling me it was dead. There was a lot of crying; weirdly, more from them than me. It wasn't because they were particularly fond of the cat—he was overweight and aggressive and as my dad liked to point out, “an asshole”—they were just worried about me. They assumed I'd be devastated. I was the one who'd brought the asshole cat home in the first place, and the only one in our family who spent any time with him. I was sad that he was gone, but not nearly to the extent that my parents had braced themselves for. It wasn't the kind of sad that permeates your bones, or makes you want to sob until you're dry-heaving. It was more like the “Oh my god, I can't believe they canceled
The Six Million Dollar Man
” sad.

When my parents were satisfied that they'd done their best to comfort me, I went upstairs to my bedroom to listen to records. I put on
Frampton Comes Alive!
, which I'd recently borrowed from a friend's older sister. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to convince myself that I was fine. This was the first time that anybody—or anything, I guess—close to me had died, and I wasn't sure how to make sense of it. Not just of death, but of everything. I pictured the earth in my head. And then I watched as it got smaller and smaller, becoming one of many planets, until it was just another speck in the vast canvas of the galaxy. And then even our galaxy began to diminish, swallowed up by bigger solar systems and black holes that seemed to stretch on forever. Soon anything even remotely recognizable was gone and it was all just black and emptiness that went on and on and on and . . .

But then there was Peter Frampton, playing that weird guitar that sounded like a scatting droid from
Star Wars
. At first, I thought there was something wrong with my record player. Or maybe I was hallucinating. What the hell was I hearing? When I focused on that
fucked-up guitar, I was able to catch my breath again, and my heart didn't sound so much like bongo drums. I never listened to Frampton again, but for one horrible night, it was a life preserver.

“I thought you hated Peter Frampton,” she said.

“Oh god, I can't stand him.”

“So you want to hear the album again because . . . you miss your cat?”

“No, it's not about the cat. I don't even remember its name.”

“Well forgive me if I'm being cynical, but why would you possibly need to hear music you dislike that you only associate with a cat you barely remember?”

I really didn't know how to answer that. Maybe it was like having a tattoo—which I don't have, so I'm entirely going on conjecture—where even though it's faded and looks more like a bruise and you have only a hazy recollection of why you wanted it in the first place, you'd still never get rid of it. Because it's part of your skin now. It's a scar, and scars mean something.

“This whole conversation is just making me sad,” Kelly said. “I'm going to go make dinner.”

She and Charlie left the office, leaving me with my Van Morrison. I waited until I could hear her footsteps down the hall before lifting the needle and moving it back to the beginning of “Dweller on the Threshold.”

When my mom asked me to accompany her on a trip down to Melbourne, Florida, to visit my ninety-four-year-old grandmother—who lived alone in a rickety house on the verge of collapsing—I immediately said yes.

Not because I had any interest in seeing that house again. Or because I was especially interested in being a part of their plot to
convince her to leave Florida and move up to Michigan, where she'd be closer to her children and grandchildren (and great-grandchildren). I was just there for the excavation, to help dig through all the trash in Grandma's house and find what deserved to be saved and what should be hauled away to a dump. I eagerly volunteered. Not out of any sense of altruism or interest in preserving the evidence of my family's history. But because I was pretty sure some of my records were in there somewhere.

Over the past half century, my grandmother's house had evolved into a sort of walk-in safe-deposit box. It's where we left everything we didn't want anymore but weren't ready to throw away, because what if we needed it?

My family has not historically been very good with the concept of throwing things away when they outlive their usefulness. And this includes pretty much everything. Clothes, appliances, furniture, food. Not because we're hoarders. We're just very, very cheap. Every relative in my gene pool is incapable of spending money on themselves without worrying that they might be squandering a financial safety net. Heaven forbid that there isn't cash hidden somewhere, to help cushion the blow of that stroke they're pretty sure is just around the corner, or that car accident that robs them of at least one of their essential limbs, or the aneurysm that hits them like lightning when they're innocently trying to shop for groceries, and the house of cards that is life comes tumbling down around them and they have to somehow find a way to pay off the never-ending ticker tape of medical bills.