Old Records Never Die (23 page)

“It'll be interesting, when you get them home and play them, if you remember the pops,” he said. “Look for the pops. Look for the pops.”

“What if I don't recognize the pops?” I asked. “How do I know they're my pops?”

“You'll know,” he said. “Just make sure you're using the right record player.”

“Like a really good one, with a lot of wow and flutter?”

“What? No. No, no. Here's what they don't tell you. The cheapie record players—the little plastic ones?—will actually play scratched-up, damaged records better. They won't give you the same fidelity. But if you have a super-good needle and a super-good audio system, it's going to pick up every imperfection in the vinyl. If you have a crappy setup, it's not going to pick that stuff up. It just slides right over it.”

I thought of my old puke-green plastic record player, the one from Fisher-Price or Tele-tone or whatever. I don't remember music ever sounding as sweet as when it came from those tiny, shitty speakers. I thought it was just nostalgia. But maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe this was how the songs that mattered to me were supposed to be heard.

“I used to have two turntables hooked up to my receiver,” Bob said. “One of 'em was a nice one and the other one was not as nice. And I always listened to the one that wasn't so nice. Because it sounded better. To my ears, it sounded more authentic.”

“Maybe 'cause that's the way you heard them the first time?”

“But I think it's about how technology doesn't always make things better. People try to fix things that aren't broken. We got a lot right the first time. As a species, we figured a lot of things out a long time ago. And then we just mess them up by trying to make them better. There was nothing wrong with books that aren't on a tiny screen you can carry around with you. The Internet kind of makes things worse more than it makes it better.”

“I miss my old record player,” I said suddenly. And I said it with the same trembling force in my voice that I would have used to admit how much I miss my dad. Maybe those two things were intertwined somehow. Mixed up together.

He smiled at me. A tender, compassionate smile that isn't the typical emotional currency of two guys who've known each other less than a collective twenty-four hours.

“Let's smoke some more ganja,” he said.

He rolled another joint, and I breathed it in greedily. The weed agreed with me. Not because it was especially potent—any medicated bliss lasted no longer than an average Ramones song—but because it reminded me of weed from the eighties and nineties. It was unhealthy-looking and full of seeds and you had to smoke a preposterous amount of it to feel anything approaching stoned. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Bob's weed was just as old as all the records in his basement.

I liked that idea. It made me happy. I laughed out loud, till tears started rolling down my cheeks. It was comforting and also stupid—two things that coexist so perfectly together. I could, at that exact
moment, be listening to the very same Iggy Pop album I'd bought at Record Swap back in the late eighties, while simultaneously smoking the exact strain of terrible weed, made on the cheap in a closet with a heat lamp, that I'd bought from a guy with a purple Mohawk and the jeans with preshredded knees in the alley behind the Record Swap.

“You feeling anything?” Bob asked, passing the joint back to me.

I was feeling something, all right. Something I thought I'd never feel again.

I felt invincible.

M
om, be careful, Jesus!”

The table slipped from her hands and dragged against the doorframe with a screeching BREEEEK.

“I've got it,” she lied, and reached under the table with purpose, as if she'd just discovered, with absolute certainty, the table's center of gravity.

I held the screen door open with my foot, and looked nervously toward the street. “We need to hurry this up,” I said.

She pushed, and grunted like a weight lifter. I fell backward, not doing an especially good job at being the “muscle” in this equation.

“Okay, too fast,” I panted.

“We should just call Alan,” my mom said. “He'd be happy to help.”

“No,” I barked at her. “We're fine.”

The less Alan knew, the better. Alan was a neighbor—a neighbor from many years ago, from back when we actually lived here. He's one of the people who owned this house, who'd agreed to let me spend an entire day (and most of a night) here. But that was all he'd
agreed to. He hadn't said yes to the table or the chairs in the backseat of my mom's car.

There were a few things I'd forgotten to mention.

We managed to shove the table inside, and it took off like a bobsled, carrying us along with it. It slid to a stop just shy of the refrigerator, and we looked up at a room that was much, much smaller than either of us remembered.

“They put in all new cupboards,” my mom said.

“Was there a wall there?” I asked.

“I'm pretty sure we had a washer and dryer in there,” my mom said. “And a toilet.”

“I'm not sure what I feel about this floor,” I said.

“Is it new tile?” she asked.

“It feels like new tile. But I'm not sure.”

“Maybe they just cleaned it.”

“No, it looks new.”

“It's so hard to tell. I'd need to see pictures.”

We stood there, looking at the kitchen and the kitchen table we'd brought, which we knew for a fact belonged here, which made everything else in here seem like it belonged, even if maybe it didn't.

It'd been a long time since I'd been inside this house. At least since 1983, when my brother and I sat on the kitchen's linoleum floor and watched movers carry boxes full of our stuff past us, grunting under the weight. I remember thinking at the time, “This is it. I'll never see this house again. It's all over.” And I wasn't being melodramatic. That was realism. What possible reason would I have for coming back here, to a place that stopped being my home when I was barely a teenager?

“This window was smaller,” my mom said, pointing to a window over the sink. “And it was a hurricane window. Does that look like the same refrigerator?”

But I was already out the door, back in the driveway, pulling chairs
out of the backseat of her car. The same broken-down wooden chairs that went with the kitchen table, even though they didn't match in any conventional sense, not just with the table but with one another, like they were children in an orphanage, thrown together by circumstance.

My mom came out to help, pulling out chairs and also grabbing a few extra things she'd brought along. Like the afghan blankets my grandmother had sewn for my brother and me when we were kids. I hadn't asked for this, but she insisted, saying it'd make the place “more homey.”

“It's gonna look weird though,” I said. “Where are we putting them, in the kitchen?”

“No, the living room,” she said.

“On the floor?”

“Well . . . okay, I see what you mean.” She paused to consider this. “Why don't we bring the couch?”

I couldn't argue that, at least aesthetically, this would be perfect. The couch, like the kitchen table and chairs, had previously existed here, so it would certainly help set the scene, so to speak. But this seemed unnecessarily complicated. And also, why did my mom still own a couch that I remember as lumpy and old back in the seventies?

“No, that's too much,” I insisted.

“I want to do it,” she said. “It'll be easy. I'll get some helpers.”

When I was a kid, any time she used the word
helpers
, she was always referring to Mark and me.

Northport, the town where my family and I lived during most of my childhood, is a small place. And as in any small town, people are nosy. The last thing I needed was for somebody to make a few calls, let the real owners know what we were doing in their house. Because they hadn't agreed to all of this. All they'd offered was a twelve-hour window to see the house again, and maybe listen to a few songs within those familiar walls. Nobody had consented to a
kitchen set and a couch. And the cereal. And the other guys who'd be joining me soon, at least one of them with a sack full of punk-rock records, which we were intending to play very, very loud.

They weren't the only ones who wanted to come. Not for the music, but to see our old house semidecorated. Several aunts and uncles called, asking if they could “stop by for a peek.” I've said no to all of them. This wasn't Lincoln's log cabin. I didn't want to put up velvet rope dividers, so visitors could gawk at my childhood tableaux from a safe distance. I had enough to worry about without hosting any tour groups.

I walked upstairs with the posters, looking for my old room, and Mom followed. I immediately realized that something was wrong.

“Your bedroom,” I gasped, turning to her.

It was . . . gone.

The place where a door used to be, which once led into the room where their bed used to be, was conspicuously absent. There was a wall now. We both just stood there, confused, like lost children in a hedge maze. We touched the fresh paint—or maybe old paint, I don't know. It could've been like this since the nineties. It didn't matter. There was a wall! Where there wasn't supposed to be a wall!

I walked down the hall. The carpeting felt weird under my feet. The sound of it made no sense to me. My every memory of this hallway came with a soundtrack of squeaking. The constant feet scuttling across wood floors. It sometimes sounded like the nails were loosening and everything would crumble under us. There was none of that now.

They'd taken all the life out of the house, the ghosts had been whooshed away. And they probably thought it was an improvement too.

I found my room—which, by some miracle, wasn't walled up. It looked about the same as I remembered it, maybe a little smaller. But Mark's room, across the hall, couldn't have been more different.

“Fuck,” my mom said, offering a rare curse word to capture her emotions. “This is huge.”

Back in the seventies, my brother did have the largest bedroom in the house, as he did in every house we'd ever lived in. But not this big. This room was almost as big as the first apartment I rented after graduating from college. Its ceilings were somehow higher than the rest of the house. The walls, a soft yellow, seemed like they'd been covered in a more expensive brand of paint. And the closet . . .

“It's a walk-in closet!” my mom exclaimed.

“I think it used to be your bedroom,” I said.

That's why a wall was blocking access to what had been my parents' marital bedroom. It'd been converted into a walk-in closet for whoever lived in this room.

I'm sure you don't care. Why would you care? Houses are renovated all the time. There is nothing remarkable about this. But for us—okay, maybe just me—it was egregious. An unthinkable atrocity. This room—a room that was now a closet—was where I went when I had nightmares. It's where I crawled into the covers, protected by the impenetrable walls of my parents' bodies. It's where my brother and I would pound on the door or just come charging in on the weekends, at least until that time I accidentally walked in on them having sex, and then I always knocked. It's where my dad would tell ghost stories to Mark and me under the covers, and they always involved dead birds on the beach, because that was my brother's personal phobia, and it was always guaranteed to send shivers up his spine, even if a random dead bird usually didn't make much narrative sense in the story.

At least my brother's room could be restored to its original aesthetics, if only in piecemeal, and temporarily. I opened my messenger bag, filled with rolled-up posters, and pulled out the one with
KISS
written in pencil on the side. I placed it against the back wall of
Mark's old room, right about where I remembered his bed being, and slowly spread it open.

It was a portrait of all four band members, mugging for the camera with their best Kabuki-rock poses. I had spent weeks trying to find this very specific poster, which I only remembered because of an old Polaroid from that era—a curious portrait of my brother looking like somebody who has subsisted entirely on sugar and power chords—which is to say, bloated and weak and unclear of his surroundings. I have no clue why anyone felt “This is a moment that needs to be preserved forever in a photograph.” Behind him is the poster, hanging over his bed like a coat of arms.

I had to sift through a lot of KISS merchandise online before finding this exact poster. I learned that it's called a “KISS Destroyer Sparkle Poster.”

My mom looked at the poster and decided it was on the wrong wall. “It should be over there,” she said, pointing toward the wall next to the door.

“Are you sure?” I said, when she held the poster up to show me. “That doesn't look right.”

“I'm sure it was here,” she said. “See . . .” She took the Polaroid and placed it against the wall. “There's just enough room here for a single bed.”

We taped it up and stepped back for a better look. “I don't know,” I said, unconvinced.

“Are you sure that's the right poster?” she said, her eyes darting from the Polaroid to the wall and back again. “It looks so much smaller here.”

“It's the right one,” I insisted. But now I wasn't so sure.

We tried every wall—a little higher, a little lower, no, no, closer to the window—but everything seemed off. It wasn't exactly how we pictured it in our muddy memories.

“We could bring a bed in here,” my mom suggested. “That might give us the frame of ref—”

“No, absolutely not,” I shot back. “We're done with furniture.”

I finally stopped listening to her, and put it on the wall I'd argued for in the first place.

“Is this where you're going to do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“The thing. Whatever you're doing with the records.” She laughed. “Mark says you're having a séance.”

“Of course he says that. If he bothered to return my calls, I could explain a little better.”

I had probably already explained too much. That was the problem. At first, he was excited about seeing the old house, even if he didn't entirely understand why it had to involve listening to a bunch
of vinyl records. But sure, if that was the price of admission, he'd pay it. But his enthusiasm wavered with each new e-mail, when I mentioned the furniture, and the guests who would be joining. He was nervous that this was becoming something he didn't want to be involved in, so he stopped responding.

“I'll just call him, tell him to come over now,” my mom said, taking out her cell phone.

“It can't be now, we're not ready,” I said.

“It's fine,” she insisted.

“It's not fine. It has to be perfect.”

I didn't know what I meant by that.

She shrugged and put her phone away. And we both sat on the floor of Mark's gigantic empty bedroom and said nothing.

I could feel the panic rising in me again. What the hell was I doing? I hadn't intended any of this. I wanted to keep it simple, like my brother preferred.

It's not like it happened overnight, and I just woke up one morning and said, “Let's take this to a really weird and uncomfortable place.” It happened in inches, so I never really saw what it was turning into until it was too late.

Here's a timeline of how I remember it unfolding.

A little over a month ago

During a phone call with my mom, I mentioned that I'd been thinking about visiting the old house, maybe asking the owners if I could bring a record player in there, play a few songs, just for old time's sake. I laughed as I said this. But she liked the idea. She encouraged me.

“You should talk to them,” she said.

My father was a pastor, so our home was never technically owned by us. It was and continues to be owned by the church, a United Church of Christ parish with a congregation of about a
hundred people. Mom had heard through the grapevine that the current pastor was leaving, and there might be a vacancy before the new pastor moved in.

“Just tell them what you want to do,” my mom said. “Don't mention the records, though. Make it sound more normal.”

A month ago

I sent a letter to one of our old neighbors, a long-standing church board member with political clout. She replied with an optimistic e-mail, promising that it would be discussed in a church council meeting. Also, she wanted me to know that she'd seen photos of my son on Facebook, and he is adorable.