The Vinyl Princess (6 page)

T
he minimart on Telegraph and Alcatraz was robbed last night, and this time someone got hurt. The robbers were surprised when an employee came out of the bathroom holding a
Road & Track
magazine, which they mistook for a gun. One of them shot the guy in the arm. He’s going to be okay but I hope he wasn’t planning a career as a major league pitcher. Right after that, as if that weren’t bad enough, the perps went another couple of blocks down Telegraph and robbed a barbecue place, a pretty bold move. The minimart got them on the security camera but they were wearing ski masks and it was too grainy for a positive ID. How is it that you can get a crystal-clear picture on a cell phone camera but security cameras still deliver the picture quality of your great-aunt’s black-and-white TV that she bought in the sixties to watch
I Love Lucy
on?

Bob has put the store on what he’s calling “high security alert,” which one might take to mean that he’s handing out assault rifles and digging foxholes, but all it really means is that we’re supposed to report any suspicious-looking characters immediately. That’s a bit tricky. Everyone on Telegraph looks at least a little suspicious, even Bob himself. The entire avenue is like one big Fellini film. The only way a person would look even remotely unusual to a Bob & Bob’s employee is if that person were actually standing in front of them in a ski mask, waving a gun, and it would be a little late to alert anyone at that point. And who are we supposed to report these suspicious characters to anyway? Homeland Security? Bob? You can’t arrest someone just for looking suspicious.

The neighborhood cops even stopped by on their bicycles. (I don’t like their chances of catching up to the perps in their getaway car on those bikes, even if they pedaled like the Wicked Witch of the West, and besides, even if they could catch them, what would they do? Ask the robbers to pull over and wait while they get off their bikes and arrest them?) They gave us some helpful tips on what to do in the case of a robbery. They told us not to play the hero. For eight bucks an hour? Don’t worry about it. And hand the money over to them cheerfully. We’ll hand it over, all right, but cheerfully? We don’t even do that for our customers. Record store employees are misanthropes. It goes with the territory. Plus, if you’ve worked retail for more than six months you will most certainly be suffering from Retail Burnout Syndrome. Even if you were cheerful when you were hired, you won’t be for long.

Jennifer and Laz have banded together as selfproclaimed “crime experts.” Jennifer knows someone who was shot in the leg (of course she does—spilled blood is only one of her many ghoulish preoccupations), and Laz has started his own perp walk of all the neighborhood unsavories that he’s acquainted with. He has a long list of suspects, and I hate to burst his Columbo bubble, but the cops say it’s very unlikely that the suspects are from the neighborhood. Still, I think it’s nice that the latest crime spree has brought him out of his shell.

I have my own suspects but I’m not saying anything right now. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed these two guys hanging around who look a little uptown for this end of Telegraph. Telegraph Avenue runs for miles and becomes Oakland somewhere along the way, but this end, the Berkeley end, is only about six blocks long and ends at the campus. It’s like falling down a rabbit hole and arriving in 1967. You notice new people, and these two are definitely a little slick for around here. When I first saw them, right around the same time that the robberies started, I figured that they were dealers moved in from San Francisco or Oakland or some other city, looking for a new customer base. One of my suspects is taller and wears a black wool beanie and a spendy black leather jacket. He wears some expensive-looking pimp bling too. The other one wears a tracksuit and a headband. It’s entirely possible that they have a little armed-robbery hobby. Everyone needs a hobby. These two also don’t look like the kind of people who would be entirely uncomfortable pointing a gun. I’ve seen them getting into an illegally parked late-model BMW with slick rims and throbbing woofers. One of them, the one in the tracksuit, was in Bob’s last Saturday night buying a hip-hop CD. He was definitely not interested in exchanging pleasantries with me. Next time I see Shorty and Jam, I’ll ask about them. Nothing happens on the street without those two noticing, at least nothing drug-related.

The other thing about neighborhood crime is that it tends not to be too good for business. People like to watch it on the news from the comfort of their La-Z-Boy recliners and shake their heads at the state of the world while they munch on a bag of Cheetos, but they’re not keen on getting too close. This has put Bob in a worse-than-usual state of mind and he’s filled the CD carousel with Nick Cave and Nina Simone and Jeff Buckley and a few other Gloomy Gus–type singers, consequently depressing everyone in the store until we’re all staring out the front window into the fog, which rolled in last night, casting a gray pall over the city. It’s the first fog of the summer and I forgot to bring a sweater, so I’m cold and miserable in my Babes in Toyland T-shirt and a denim skirt. Jennifer takes her shift to cover the cash register. She’s dressed for all kinds of weather in her knee-high Doc Martens and her leather motorcycle jacket, a year-round uniform. I go out on the floor with a price gun and mark down the soul section. Bob doesn’t like product to gather dust, so if the date on the price tag is more than thirty days ago, we mark it down by a dollar. It’s a tedious job and you have to keep stopping to change the price on the gun. That gets old fast.

My
Vinyl Princess
fanzines are now in position on the top row of the magazine rack next to all the other zines. After I made room for it, I stood back and tried to be objective. It definitely jumps out at you. Plus, mine’s the only free one. I figure I’ll give it out to specific customers and then let people take it themselves too. They’re obviously not for everyone. This is how it starts: one magazine at a time, and then, before you know what’s happening, you’re some kind of trendsetter. People want to know your opinion about things and where you shop and who cuts your hair (me) and how you got this movement started. To be honest, no one’s picked one up yet, but these things take time. I’ll have to be patient. Bob hasn’t noticed the zines yet. I’m going to give it a couple of days and then I’ll mention it . . . maybe.

Bob spends the afternoon in the cramped office, trying to start a fight with Dao, but she’s not having any of it today. Every time I go in there for something, he’s picking on her. She keeps her head down and ignores him. I give her a lot of credit for knowing how to handle Bob. Most people bite and before they know it, they’re involved in a three-hour rant about the shameful lack of socialized medicine in this country or how we’re getting screwed by the North American Free Trade Agreement or something like that. Bob finally gives up on her and comes out onto the floor to work on me for a while.

“Al, can you get to country today too? That section’s a mess.”

“Sure, Bob, but I did it a week ago; how bad could it be?”

He takes off his reading glasses and rubs his eyes. He puts them back on and regards me over the rims.

“Really? It’s only been a week? ’Cause it’s a mess. I checked it last night.” He tries to look like he honestly cares about the country section, which he absolutely does not except for Gram Parsons, whom we file in rock but a lot of people call him a country artist.

I click the trigger on the price gun and punch him in the arm with it, leaving a red $7.98 price tag stuck to his biceps. He looks at it as though he finds it baffling. He peels it off, folds it into a ball between his fingers and flicks it into the air.

“Did you see that Miles Davis vinyl that came in yesterday?” he asks.

“Yup.” I was there. He’s referring to a Miles Davis vinyl collectible called
Miles Ahead
with the original cover art from 1957. I’m trying to figure out how I can own it. “It’s totally cool.”

“Yup.”

He tells me again about the time he saw Miles play in New York City, how it blew his mind. I like hearing it again. It’s a good story, and Miles is dead now, so I’ll never get a chance like that.

“Hey, did you read the piece on Robert Plant in
Rolling Stone
?” he asks.

“Yeah, I did.”

Bob nods. This is something we do a lot of: this “blah, blah, blah, fill-in-band.” Bob can do it for hours. I’m one of an ever-shortening list of accomplices who can keep up with him. Bob and I talk about Led Zeppelin, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, the Honey Drippers and on and on, nothing new, really; it’s not like we haven’t had this conversation before. We get each other going and then we completely lose track of time.

“Did you ever hear him and Jimmy Page do that old Hank Williams Jr. song, ‘My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It’ on that Sun Records tribute album?” asks Bob.

“No. How did I miss that?”

“I’ve got a copy in the office. Hang on. I’ll throw it on for ya.” He heads to the office.

I watch Bob for a few seconds and then, out of the corner of my eye, I spy M walking past the front of the store. He glances in at the front counter, at Jennifer. Damn, that should have been me! Maybe he was looking for me. I pretend I have important business in front of the store and bolt out the door and onto the sidewalk, but by the time I get there all I see is the back of M as he walks to the corner, checks for cars and then walks across the street, alongside the empty lot toward campus, his long, lean legs taking him away from me. Damn, damn, damn! I stand there, dangling the gun at my side, watching him disappear, willing him to turn around but he doesn’t. Jimmy the Rasta dude grins at me from behind his incense emporium. When I walk back into the store, Laz and Jennifer are standing at the counter, watching me with interest.

“I thought I saw someone suspicious,” I say.

They both wait for more.

“But I was wrong.”

* * *

After work I get myself right home to partake in the fourth meal in four days that my mom will pretend she cooked. This one’s no dress rehearsal, though. “Jack” is coming to dinner and she says she’s dying for us to meet, something to do with exposing the baggage early in the relationship, I suspect, because I can’t imagine any other scenario where that could possibly be true. I muse over M as I roll down the sidewalk on my skateboard. If I’d had half a chance, if I’d even learned his real name and maybe gotten to know him a bit, I could have invited him along tonight. It’s the kind of thing where I’d want him along. Maybe he’d even come. Maybe he could use a fake home-cooked meal.

Up ahead I see Florence Kobayashi, our neighbor, hobbling up the sidewalk on her way home from work. I slow down as I come up behind her and jump off my board. Florence is a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco. She stands there all day, making sure that people don’t touch the priceless paintings or, God forbid, try to make off with them. I’m not really sure what she would do in that particular situation, since she’s just over four feet high and weighs about ninety pounds. I guess she would have to radio for backup. I used to think that she probably knew a lot about art or that she might even love it, but when I asked her about it she just shrugged.

“It makes my hips hurt,” she told me.

Florence has to stand in one spot for seven hours a day. She’s sixty-four years old and she’s been working there for ten years. I don’t understand why they don’t let the guards sit down. She told me that she’s learned to sleep standing up like a horse. She wears black sneakers with thick rubber soles, the kind that young boys wear with baggy jeans that hang down around their knees and boxers underneath.

“Hi, Mrs. Kobayashi,” I call out.

She turns around, startled, until she recognizes me.

“Oh, hi, Allie,” she says.

“How are things at the museum?” I ask.

“Very busy. Matisse, you know?”

“Matisse?”

She nods.

“Very pretty,” I say, although I can’t visualize one single painting right now.

“Very pretty,” she says with zero enthusiasm as she pulls her navy blue sweater tighter around her middle and continues stiffly up the sidewalk, favoring her right side.

When I come up the walk to my house, I’m quite certain I smell bread baking and I know that this simply can’t be right. This warm, comforting aroma can’t possibly be coming from our house. I pull open the front door and find my mom in the kitchen, her brow furrowed as she reads the back of an empty plastic frozen bread package. She’s wearing a soft lavender-colored linen skirt and a white silky blouse. Her hair is piled on her head and escaped tendrils of it cling damply to her pale neck. Her cheeks are flushed. Pierre is not in his usual spot on the dining room table. An abandoned felt catnip mouse lies there in the empty space, cast aside, like us.

“Hi, honey.” My mom peers into the oven and sighs.

“What’s going on in there?” I ask.

“Well, it says here that you’re supposed to let it rise somewhere warm for three hours, but I didn’t know that till an hour ago, so I put it in the bathroom while I was showering and I may have splashed some water on it.” She sighs again.

“Let me have a look.”

My mom stands out of the way and I peer through the glass at the submarine sandwich–size loaf of bread dough sitting in the middle of a baking pan. The drops of water have dried on the surface and resemble a skin disease. It looks anemic and hopeless.

I look at my mom. “What possessed you to bake? We have four bakeries within walking distance.”

She shrugs and grabs her purse off the back of a chair. She pulls a five-dollar bill out of her wallet and hands it to me.

“Is that hush money? Because I won’t keep quiet for anything less than a twenty.”

“Take it. Go to Semifreddi and get a nice loaf of bread. Please.”

“Okay, but I think you’re giving up too easily. That thing in the oven could have a strong future if you’d just give it a chance.”

“Go.” She points to the door.

I take my time because I’m compiling a list of LPs for my top five of the week.