Old Records Never Die (28 page)

He told us about his uncle—a man who'd been closer to him than his own dad, who'd supported John through some of the roughest periods of his life—and now he was dead, after a long battle with cancer. His body just gave up, John told us. “The chemo did him in. If he hadn't done the chemo, he might've had three good years instead of two horrible years with his body pumped full of chemicals.”

It all came gushing out, like John had stepped into a confessional after holding on to these bad thoughts for too long. Any echoes of the punk kid I remembered had evaporated in an instant, and he suddenly seemed very fragile, very human.

“He reminded me of your dad,” John said, as he replaced the Stooges with some Blondie.

“Really?” I said. I wasn't sure yet if that was supposed to be a good thing.

“Your dad was a great guy,” John said. “He was really kind to me when things went south.”

“Yeah,” Mike agreed. “Such a smart, funny, radical dude.”

“Radical?” This was fascinating and entirely new information. “Radical how?”

They told me stories about my dad that didn't seem real. They were like medieval folk tales, something shirtless gladiators would brag about after a few flagons of mead. My dad, if their stories were to be believed, was a badass in a clerical collar, somebody willing to get into philosophical smackdowns with sneering atheists, and leave them just enough to chew on to give them a 3:00 a.m. sit-up-in-bed existential crisis. Also, if you were young and confused and angry, he invariably knew the exact thing to say to make you think twice about your self-hatred.

Stories of my dad evolved into stories about Mike's dad, who'd died a few years earlier. I'd only ever known his father as a volunteer fireman and Boy Scout leader, and apparently those were the first things mentioned in his obituary. And then we talked of John's real dad, a highway patrolman in California—like Erik Estrada in
CHiPS
!—who John had lived with briefly after his parents' divorce, which is where he discovered punk music, which he brought back to us in our sleepy little northern Michigan town.

Between the three of us, we had zero fathers or father figures. They were all dead or gone. We could feel the crispness of their absence all over again, like they'd only just disappeared and we were still grappling with the idea that they wouldn't be coming back.

I still hadn't really accepted it. And the way Mike and John talked about their dads, it was obvious they hadn't either. We all knew our dads were supposed to die someday, but that was supposed to happen in the future, when we were old. Well, older. Older than this. It was too soon. We needed more time. Life was happening too fast. We needed everything to slow the fuck down for a minute.

Sometimes life feels like I'm one of those goddamn millennials
grazing on YouTube videos. It's always, “Next, next, next, okay what's next? That was funny. Next video!” Calm the hell down, junior! What is the rush? Can't we all just take a deep breath and not be in such a hurry to get into the next thing?

We talked about our dead dads over the course of a Dinosaur Jr. record (
You're Living all over Me
), a U2 record (
Achtung Baby
), two songs into a Dead Kennedys record (
Frankenchrist
—until we realized it wasn't really conducive to conversation), and the first side of David Bowie's
Heroes
. It wasn't maudlin. Maybe it was the music, which was too loud and forced us to talk even louder to be heard over it. It never occurred to us to turn it down. Bowie was ostensibly singing about lovers in Berlin, but we were only hearing what we wanted to hear. To our ears, it was about three guys in their forties, sitting around a mostly empty kitchen, eating Boo Berry.

“We're nothing,” Bowie wailed. “And nothing will help us.”

Amen.

And then the phone rang.

Not our cell phones, which were sitting on the kitchen table. No, the ringing was coming from the wall-mounted rotary phone, in jaundice white, with its well-worn finger wheel, helpful sets of letters next to each number, and a self-identifying phone number, written in faded typewriter ink on the middle faceplate and protected under plastic.

The phone was just out of reach, in the empty space between the table and the door leading out into the dining room and the rest of the house. It was exactly where it'd always been—the only thing here that was entirely unchanged since we left. It was even the same model 554 phone—the one both sets of my grandparents had owned, and my parents owned during the entirety of my childhood.

The record ended, but nobody got up to change it. We let the needle tread water, stuck in the dead wax, grumbling static about
being ignored. We were too transfixed by the phone, which kept ringing, and ringing. It rang so hard, it rattled the house. I don't remember it being that loud, but I suppose it must've been. Before we all started carrying miniature phones around with us, there was just the one phone in the kitchen—the command center for all outside communication. It had to be loud enough to get the attention of anyone in a four-bedroom, three-story house. If you were doing laundry down in the basement or taking a shit in the upstairs bathroom, it had to find you, and let you know, SOMEBODY WANTS TO TALK TO YOU! COME HERE, COME HERE BEFORE THEY GO AWAY!

We stared at the phone as it kept ringing, practically shouting at us, and we steadfastly refused to answer it. We didn't need to discuss it. We were on the same page. If you're in an empty house, with no legal occupants or furniture (other than what you dragged in with you), and you've consumed two six-packs of beer while talking about your respective dead dads and how much you'd like to hear their voices again, and a phone that shouldn't still be connected—is by all accounts a useless piece of antique machinery that has been abandoned and rendered incapable of achieving a dial tone—starts ringing out of the blue, under no circumstance is it a good idea to pick up that receiver.

Unless, you know, you want to pee yourself.

So we waited. And the phone kept ringing, and we scrunched up our faces in that way you would if you were thinking, “Please stop ringing. Please stop ringing. This is freaking me out. Please stop. Just stop. I'm begging you to stop. One more ring, and I'm running out of here screaming.”

It finally stopped. And then there was just the silence, and the gentle crackling of a stylus waiting to be plucked from vinyl purgatory.

Nobody knew what to do next.

And then John figured it out.

“Holy shit, man, is this
Night Flight
?”

I looked over, and John was holding the greasy black K-Tel disk.

“It is,” I told him. “But I think we lost the cover somewhere.”

“Did that record ever even have a cover?” Mike asked.

“You know what's weird?” John said. “I remember borrowing records from you guys, or borrowing back my own records, and every now and then this thing would be inside.”

“What?” I said, trying to appear like this was new information to me. “That's crazy.”

“I used to get so pissed off. But then I was like, ‘All right, fine, let's listen to it.' And it kind of rocks.”

“You want to listen to it now?” I asked.

“
Greatest American Hero
?” Mike said.

“Hell to the yes,” John shouted.

Maybe my brother had been right after all when he'd flippantly suggested that I was hosting a séance. It hadn't started out that way, but it was now abundantly clear to all of us that there were ghosts in this kitchen. The ringing phantom phone just drove that point home. And it was kind of spooky at first. But now that they'd given up trying to make a long-distance call from the afterlife and seemed content with just hanging out and being chill, we could all enjoy ourselves again.

Look at what's happened to me

I can't believe it myself

I could see the goose bumps on John's arms. They were the size of silver dollars. But I'm not sure if it's because he thought his dead uncle was here—that he could practically feel his uncle's breath in the air, warm and alive and present—or because singing along to “Believe
It or Not” at the top of your lungs while making rock horns is way more satisfying than pretending not to be terrified by the Misfits.

Mark arrived, with his wife, Amy, in tow, right around the time we'd finished our second bowl of Boo Berry. At first, they just stood at the door, peeking inside but not fully committing to actually coming inside.

John and Mike jumped up to greet them, and exchanged stiff handshakes with Mark.

“You're looking good, man,” John said.

“Yeah, yeah, you too,” Mark responded.

Their eyes darted across each other, trying to decide if this was what they'd expected. Did Mark look like a billionaire? And did John embody everything Mark had anticipated from a convicted criminal? In both cases, they seemed disappointed. Shouldn't Mark have been wearing a monocle and top hat? And John, shockingly, had neither a cat burglar mask nor a burlap sack.

Mark and Amy finally felt safe enough to venture inside, and I gave them a tour of the old house. We went from room to room, trying to trace the furniture with our fingers, debating where end tables had been located, and the color of vases that now only existed in our memories. Mark reminded me that the guest room—which I remembered as Dad's office—was intended for a baby Cambodian girl that our parents had intended on adopting but for whatever reason never did.

With the others trailing behind us, Mark and I scoured the house for evidence of us. We'd find scratches on doorframes and baseboards that had somehow escaped the revisionist history of paint, and we'd lean in for a closer look. We'd trace our fingers around the edges, like anthropologists trying to piece together the clues of an
ancient civilization. And then we'd debate its origins, sometimes fiercely. Were those ragged holes on my bedroom door from the sliding bolt lock I'd installed to keep my brother out? I thought the placement was all off, but Mark was convinced. We gave every battle scar a rich backstory, assigning them more narrative weight than they probably deserved.

I showed Mark his bedroom, and waited for him to be delighted by the KISS poster—the exact KISS poster he'd slept under for most of his prepubescence. But it didn't even get a smile out of him. He acknowledged that it was the right poster, but was unconvinced with the placement.

“I think it was on the other wall,” he said, his arms crossed tightly.

“No, no, you're confused. It wouldn't make any sense over there. It was right above your bed's headboard.”

“Yes, which was over there.”

He was far more interested in the record player, the General Electric V638h that was our introduction to music, the “cheap piece of shit” (Mark's words) that helped us learn all the words to Bob McGrath songs, and gave us chills every time those trumpets blared the opening on the
Star Wars
soundtrack, and made us believe that grown men in Kabuki makeup and codpieces singing about important topics—rocking all night, partying every day, and Detroit being a city in which both of those activities could be voraciously enjoyed—had access to information about life that would be useful to us, so we better listen up.

I carried the record player up to the second floor and put it in the hallway between our two bedrooms, right where we had always kept it. When Mark caught a glimpse of it, his entire face lit up. All of that cynicism and reluctance, it just instantly disappeared, or at least got momentarily shoved into a dark corner.

He dropped to the floor and started examining the GE, feeling his way across the familiar knobs and switches.

“How have these knobs not broken off?” he asked. “They couldn't be made of cheaper plastic.”

“Well, I guess whoever owned this never actually used it.”

“It's just terrible,” Mark said, with a huge smile. “It's amazingly bad craftsmanship. How did we keep ours for so long?”

“I think it was taped together near the end,” I said. “Also, I don't think we had a choice.”

Mark looked at it, unblinking and amazed, laughing at its stone-age technology, but still showing very real tenderness for it. This was a man worth millions. And here he was on all fours in an empty house, transfixed by a plastic record player barely worth twenty-five bucks on eBay.

While Mark and I huddled around the record player on the floor, Amy stood patiently by the stairs, and the other guys wandered in and out of rooms, discussing what they remembered, and how the current dimensions of the house betrayed those memories.

“How'd you fit the drum set in here?” John asked from my old bedroom.

John was perplexed. The room wasn't big enough for all the things he remembered being in there. Like the drum set, which I never actually owned. Or the two desks I'd apparently lined up like the wrap-around command console on the starship
Enterprise
—which, again, wasn't true.