Old Records Never Die (21 page)

These days, I'm old and lazy, and when I listen to new music, I want to be swept off my feet right away rather than doing any hard work. Even before I started looking for my old records, I noticed that I'd lost some of the patience you need to forge an emotional connection with a slightly different combination of rhythm, melody, and harmony. Not even with artists I was hearing for the first time. I'm talking about bands and musicians who I already had chemistry with.

I feel about
OK Computer
like some people feel about family members. But when Radiohead put out
In Rainbows
, I thought it was just “meh,” and the band hasn't meant as much to me since. There was a seismic shift in our relationship.

I had something special with Ryan Adams's
Heartbreaker
, but
Gold
felt forced, like date night in a loveless marriage. Has Adams made more albums since? Probably, I don't know.

And that's just two of countless artists—Clap Your Hands Say
Yeah, the Strokes, the Gaslight Anthem, the National—who had my unconditional love until they made a semi-okay album that left me empty, and I haven't returned their phone calls since.

I used to actively seek out new music. I used to read
Pitchfork
religiously, and make a commitment to a new album based on the cover art alone, and spend money I couldn't afford to lose on music I'd never actually heard just because a woman with a bleach-blond fohawk and a
Death to the Pixies
half shirt told me that it was her new religion. But now, I'm in record stores looking for names I recognize, cruising eBay for albums that might be battered and bruised enough to be former friends, and sitting in cold storage rooms in the middle of blizzards, looking through boxes of records that are warped not just from years of being stored in moldy boxes, but from a total lack of human touch, like newborns in a Romanian nursery.

Seeing that copy of
In the Aeroplane over the Sea
isn't a reminder of what I'm searching for. It's a reminder of what I'm turning into. If I find one of my lost records in these boxes, so what? How is it not the burning sled at the end of
Citizen Kane
? Isn't it just more evidence that I've stopped evolving, that I'm stuck in some past idea of self that I can't break out of?

After Kelly and I got married, we'd joke about how the only thing we'd miss about being single was the excitement of a first kiss. The not knowing, the butterflies in your stomach, the flush of excitement when you lean in and you feel your lips on a stranger's lips for the first time, and it's all so new and perfect and terrifying and awesome. After two decades of marriage, you're not even romanticizing the first kiss anymore. It's so far in your rearview mirror.

That's what it feels like is happening with my relationship with music. And I don't know if I'm okay with giving up the first kiss.

I kept flipping, because it was all I could do.

Until I'd gone through everything.

There's a panic that sets in when I'm on the last box. It was a feeling I felt as a teenager, after I'd spent an entire Saturday flipping through endless crates of vinyl at the old Record Swap in Homewood, walking down row after beautiful-smelling row, drunk on possibilities, until I realized I was on the last crate, and there was nothing else to look at—except maybe the VHS section—and I was gripped with the existential panic of a record-store browser, the opposite of buyer's remorse—the non-buyer's remorse, when you wonder what you missed from flipping too fast and looking so far ahead that you weren't paying attention to what was right under your nose.

I felt it now, as Bob carried over the last few boxes, and my flipping finger had slowed from a manic “I don't know how much time we have” desperation to a lumbering “what if I walk out of here with nothing?” crawl. The terror that I couldn't possibly search through all these records had turned into a terror that I had searched through them too quickly.

“You want to go back to the house?” Bob asked.

I was flipping slowly, meticulously, through the last dozen or so records in the last box when he said this, and it sent a chill down my spine. I didn't want to seem too eager, but also didn't want to seem in any way hesitant. So I blurted out “Sure, yeah.”

“That's where all the good stuff is,” he said. “That's probably where your records are. We'll look through them, maybe smoke a little ganja . . .”

“I don't see any reason why we shouldn't,” I said, shoving the last box away.

This was my moment. And I knew it was my moment. I hadn't felt something like this since the last time I was single, and I was out on a date with somebody, and I knew she wanted me to kiss her, and there was that electricity when you knew you were going to kiss but
it was just a matter of how long it'd take for your lips to finally fall into each other. And that was the good part: the waiting, the anticipation, the knowing that something amazing was going to happen, as long as you didn't do anything stupid.

“So,” Bob said, breaking the silence. “You think you could give me a ride?”

We were somewhere around the middle of side two of
Rubber Soul
when the drugs began to take hold.

At first, I didn't think anything of it. I just assumed I was getting lightheaded from too little food. I hadn't eaten since breakfast, and the last time I checked my watch, it was 2:00 a.m. The only thing I'd had in my system all day were the fumes of disintegrating cardboard sleeves. But then it occurred to me, maybe this weird feeling washing over my body, making me feel like I was soaking in a warm bath, had something to do with the five joints I'd just ingested.

When Bob offered me some “ganja”—he said it just like that, “ganja,” which sounded like an undercover cop trying to buy drugs—I was hesitant. I like the idea of marijuana. God knows I'd spent the better part of my youth consuming it. But it wasn't a part of my usual routine anymore. I was out of practice. I wasn't even sure I remembered how to hold a joint, much less hold in the smoke correctly.

It wasn't a conscious decision to stop using it. It happened gradually. You go a few days without smoking, then a few months, and then blammo, you don't even have an emergency nickel bag hidden in your underwear drawer anymore. When you're in your forties and it's been over a decade since you've smoked weed, you can't just wake up one day and decide you want a joint. If you've been off wine for a decade and feel like a glass of cabernet, you just drive down to the wine store and pick up a bottle. But pot? This forty-five-year-old
guy would have better luck finding enriched uranium than skunk weed.

I hemmed and hawed when Bob started rolling, because I was nervous.

He finished the blunt and handed it to me. I looked at it, considering my options. I was in a basement in a small house in southern Illinois, in a room with an oppressively low ceiling, exposed pipes perfectly situated for head bonks, and only one exit that I was aware of, a rickety flight of stairs—with plenty of loose boards, making escape difficult at best—leading up to the first floor. It was snowing outside, and I was pretty sure my car was stuck in his driveway, submerged in a snowdrift. I wasn't going anywhere for a while.

I texted Kelly the address, told her what was happening, and asked her to stay by the phone, in case I needed her to call 911. She called me immediately, and I asked Bob if I could use his bathroom.

“I don't like anything about this,” she scolded me.

“I'll be fine,” I whispered, picking at the peeling wallpaper. “But we need a code.”

“A code for what?”

“If I'm in trouble. I can't call you and say, ‘He's handcuffed me to a radiator.' It's got to be subtle.”

How quickly the tables had turned. It wasn't that long ago that I couldn't believe he was being so trusting of me. And now here I was, worried that he was plotting something sinister.

“This is making me very uncomfortable,” she said.

“How about this. I'll tell you, ‘I wasn't able to find that Bananarama song you wanted.' That good?”

“Bananarama?”

“What's wrong with that?”

“I don't like Bananarama.”

“What does that matter? He doesn't know you.”

“Can you make it something other than Bananarama? They had one good song.”

“Bananarama is easy. I've seen a half dozen Bananarama records today. They're in my head already.”

“But it makes me look like an idiot. Can you make it Arcade Fire?”

“These are records from a store that closed in the late nineties,” I said, my voice rising a few octaves. “They're not going to have anything by Arcade Fire.”

“How would I know that?” she asked. “Maybe I think it's a new record store. Someplace with music for people not living in the past.”

“We're doing Bananarama,” I whisper-barked at her. “It's less suspicious.”

After I hung up, I took the joint. If I was going to die here, in the creepy basement out of a horror movie, in an epic snowstorm that was like an icy prison, with a wife unwilling to pretend-like Bananarama to maybe save her husband's life, I should at least go out with a smile on my face.

I smoked it tentatively, inhaling the smoke through pursed lips. I wasn't breathing much of anything in, but I bulged out my cheeks like a stoner Dizzy Gillespie.

I waited. Nothing.

Bob rolled another joint. I tried this one in earnest, letting some of the actual weed enter my lungs. It tasted awful. Like the exhaust from a city bus on a humid summer afternoon. I tried to hold it, but I ended up coughing most of it out.

I waited. Still nothing.

As if he'd been expecting this, Bob rolled a third joint while I was still hacking into my fist. And then a fourth. We passed them back and forth, wincing through bloodshot eyes.

“This stuff doesn't really work too well for me anymore,” he said.

“It's a little harsh,” I admitted, my voice reduced to a gasping croak.

“You have to smoke a fair amount of it,” he said.

“Like how much?” I asked.

He didn't answer, just went back to rolling joints.

I went back to the boxes. I wasn't sure how many I'd been through, or how many there were left. Bob hadn't given me an exact number. I knew there were a lot. I'd been down in his basement at least four hours, flipping constantly, and there was no indication that we were nearing the end, or even the middle.

I sat on his couch—which had the texture, color, and consistency of a giant turd—and leaned over the boxes that Bob would carry out, one after another, from some back room, or from a pile in the corner, or wherever he happened to shove them when his brother dropped them off. He brought out boxes faster than I could get through them.

There were two pillars, surrounding me like pieces in a game of Jenga. Satisfied that I had enough to work with, Bob ducked under the industrial work lamps—the only source of lighting down here, which hung from the ceiling from extension cords—to look at his own record collection. And, of course, to tell me about it. Because that's why any human male collects music in any format—whether it's vinyl records, CDs, or even meticulously curated MP3s on his iPod. He does it in the hope that somebody will come to his house and want to know the philosophy behind his cataloging system.

Show me a man who doesn't want to explain to you—in a monologue not dissimilar to a TED Talk—why he decided to organize his records by genre rather than alphabetically, and I'll show you a man with no soul.

“This is various artists,” he says, his voice echoing from a maze of shelves. “This is rock. That's Christmas. This is country. This over
here is my reggae. This is my reggae twelve-inches. I like to keep those separate.”

“Obviously,” I said.

“This is Zimbabwe albums,” he said, moving on. “This is African albums. This is other international stuff. This is Arabic stuff. This is folk/rock/blues/jazz.”

“All together?” I asked, looking up from my box.

“Yeah. It makes more sense that way.”

It maybe didn't make a lot of sense to devote entire sections in his music library to Africa and a country within Africa, and yet lump together Pete Seeger, Marilyn Manson, and John Coltrane into some sort of musical goulash. But something about it was calming to me.

“I have this theory that if your records are not in order, then your life cannot be in order,” he said, so quiet that I wondered if he was talking to me.

“I really think that's true,” I said.

“If you're going through a real hard time, you rearrange your records,” he said, pulling out a record to examine it, touching it gently. “That helps. It makes things make sense again.”

We had that moment, that quiet moment when you realize somebody gets you, and you feel a little less alone in the universe, and you don't want to say anything else, because saying anything else would just muddy it, and it's enough to just be quiet in the same room with somebody who thinks like you.