Final Vinyl Days Page 8

  “You have the flu,” the nurse told me after I’d waited forever in my underwear, and I made my way back out to the lone-fish lobby to find her still there, though now her ankle was all neatly bound in an Ace bandage.

  “You don’t look so great,” she said. “Why don’t I go home with you and fix you something for lunch.” I shrugged, thinking about what was in my kitchen cabinet, a moldy loaf of bread, a couple of cans of tomato soup, one can of tuna. If she could turn it into something, I’d beg her never to leave me.

  “What about your car?” I asked. Again she pointed to her ankle.

  “I can’t drive. My ankle.” For a minute she sounded just like she had years before, I can’t do that, my thumb, and I should have listened to the warning, but I was too taken by her features, a face that needed no makeup of any kind, a girl who looked like she ought to be a perfect camper.

  “I rode the bus here,” she said and extended her hand for me to help her up. “It’ll be fun to catch up on things.”

  Marlene and I picked up with each other like we’d never been apart. It was like we could read each other’s mind, and so we carefully avoided talking about the time we broke up. Instead we focused on all the good times, things we had in common just by being the same age and from the same town. Like I might say, “Remember when Tim Oates cut off the tip of his finger in shop?” and she’d say, “Yeah, he was making a TV table for his mama.” Things like that. We had things in common that might seem absolutely stupid to an outsider. After three glorious months—triple our first time together—Marlene and I finally got around to talking about all the things that ruined us before. She was starting to kind of hint about how she was going to be a professional, and how maybe I would want to be a professional, too. I sang her that song, “I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy, you see by my outfit that I’m a cowboy, too.”

  “C’mon,” she said and wrapped her arms around my neck, “I don’t mean to give you a hard time, it’s just I’ve heard you say how you really want …”

  Bad connection, bad connection. “So get you an outfit and let’s all be cowboys.” I finished the song, and she went to take her exam in a huff. I did what I always do when I’m feeling lousy, which is to sort through my albums and play all of my favorite cuts. I should have been a deejay, the lone jockey on the late-night waves, rather than employee to a squat coked-to-the-gills little rich shit. I thought of Marlene writing some spiel about composure: heal thyself. I was playing Ten Years After full blast, Sly and the Family Stone on deck. And then all in one second I felt mad as hell, as mad as I’d been on that pouring-rain camping trip when Marlene told me that it was hard for her to think of me as anything except a friend. She actually said that. It all came back to me when I saw that old Black Sabbath album, which is what she had left behind that other time she moved out. Thanks a whole helluva lot. Warms my heart to see a green-faced chick draped in scarves wandering around what looks like a mausoleum. She had said all the routine things you can think of to say. “I know you don’t really care about me,” she had said. “I could be anybody.”

  “Yeah, right,” I had told her. “I could cuddle up with Pat Paulsen and not care. I’m just that kind of insensitive jerk.”

  “But you don’t care about me,” she had said and pounded her chest with her hand, which was wrapped in a bath towel to protect the sprained thumb that had left her an absolute invalid. “I need to be my own person, have my own life.”

  I found out a day later that she already had all the info on those schools in the West; she had been looking for a good time to bail out, and it seemed camping out in a monsoon was perfect. It was hard to remember, but it seemed I said something like, “And I don’t need to have my own life?” and then the insults got thicker until before long I was told that I was apathetic and chauvinistic and my brain was stuck between my legs.

  “So that’s why you’re always asking what I’m thinking,” I said in response. By that time we were soaking wet and driving back down the rest of this mountain in the piece-of-crap car I had at the time, an orange Pinto, with a Jimi Hendrix tape playing full blast (eight-track of course). “And what kind of stupid question is that anyway, but you always ask it. What are you thinking?” Yeah, that was how the whole ride home went, and of course any time I had a good line, any time I scored, she got to cry and say what an ass I was.

  By the time she got home from her lousy test, I was as mad as if I were still there in the pouring rain, jacking that screwed-up Pinto to change a flat while she sat in the passenger side and stared straight ahead at the long stretch of road we had to travel before I could put her out. Apparently, she had been thinking it through as well, because she walked into my apartment looking just as she had when I dumped her out in front of her dorm years before. We had both played over the old stuff enough that we had independently been furious and now were simply exhausted and ready to have it all end, admit the truth. Nothing in common other than walking the planet at the same time. She was barely over her divorce, she rationalized (he had dumped her I was delighted to find). I handed her that Black Sabbath album on her way out for the second time, and we made polite promises about keeping in touch.

  And now I’ve come to this: Final Vinyl Days, the end of an era. Perfectly round black vinyl discs sit inside their faded jackets on the small table in front of my checkout and await extinction. I stare across the street, the black asphalt made shiny by the drizzling rain, the traffic light blinking red and green puddles in the gray light where a mammoth parking deck is under construction. There I see the lights in the store we compete with, Record City, and I can’t help but wonder when they’ll change their name; CD Metropolis. But what can I say about names? Any Old Way You Choose It ain’t exactly true either.

  “Record City doesn’t have these,” my boss had said just last week and began sticking this crap up all over the place. You know, life-size cutouts of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis, miniature replicas of the old tabletop jukeboxes that are really CD houses, piñatas, and big plastic blow-up dinosaurs. I work nights now, not as much business, and I don’t have to argue with the owner about what I play overhead. As far as I’m concerned, the new kids on the block are still Bruce Springsteen and Jackson Browne. My boss said it was a promotion, but I know better. Janis Joplin’s singing now, “Me and Bobby McGee.” And the Stones are on deck with “Jumping Jack Flash.” The Stones are the cockroaches of rock. They’ll be around when civilization starts over, and I cling to this bit of optimism.

  I had no choice but to give in to CDs. And yeah, they sound great, that’s true. It’s just the principle of the thing, your hand forced to change. Not to even mention the dreaded task of replacing. It’s impossible. Think of what’s not available. I’m just taking my time is all. I figure if I just go from the year of my birth to the year I graduated from college, it’ll take the rest of my life. I’m going alphabetically so that I don’t miss anything and it’s a bored, calculated way to approach life. I mean, what if that’s how I dealt with women. Imagine it: Betts, Erica, Gail, Marlene, Nancy, that one who always wore black—either Pat or Pam—Susie, Xanadu. Yeah, right, Xanadu. I thought it was kinda cute that she had gone and renamed herself. Then I learned that she had never even heard of Coleridge. Hers was some vivid childhood memory of Olivia Newton John. Scary. We were in a bar, and it was very very late so what could I expect? “Let’s get physical,” I suggested, and she raised her pencil-thin eyebrows as if trying to remember where she’d heard that line before. “Can I call you Xan?”

  “Oh, sure,” she said, “everybody does.” And when she walked ahead of me to the door, I noticed her spiderweb stockings complete with rhinestone spider. She wore a very tight black miniskirt, and I realized that my knowledge of women’s fashions had come full circle. I looked at myself in the beer-can-lined mirror to affirm that, yes, I had hit bottom. Xan and I had nothing in common except cotton mouth and body hair.

  Now Del Shannon has gone and shot himself, and no one has even asked ab
out his music. I hear the song “Runaway” and I see myself, a typical nine-year-old slouch, stretched out on my bed with a stack of comic books and the plug of my transistor radio wedged in my ear. My mom made me a bedspread that looked like a race car. The headlights down at the end faced into the hallway where my dad was standing in his undershirt, his face coated in lather. “C’mon, honey,” my mom said. “We’ve got to get down to the store,” and then there we all were in front of this little cinder-block store at the edge of town, our last name painted in big red letters on the window. There must have been at least ten people gathered for the opening, an event my dad later said (while we waited for our foot-long hot dogs to be delivered to the window of the car) was just about the proudest moment of his life. He said it was second only to marrying my mother (she had vanilla shake on her lips as she smiled back at him) and having my younger brother and me. My brother was in a French-fry frenzy, bathing the fries in the pool of catsup he’d poured into the cardboard container, but he stopped to take in the seriousness of my dad’s announcement. I remember wondering how you know when it’s the happiest moment and being dumbfounded that anyone could build a life on refigerators and stoves and be happy about it. It amazes me to think that I ever sat in the backseat of that old Chevrolet and looked at my parents (younger then than I am now) and thought how ridiculously out-dated they were.

  Now this coed comes in. Tie-dye is back, torn jeans, leather sandals. If her hair wasn’t purple and aimed at the ceiling, I could just about console my grief. “Can I help?” I ask, totally unprepared for the high squeak of a voice that comes out. She sounds like she just inhaled a balloon full of helium.

  “I want The Little Mermaid,” she says. She is wearing a high school ring on her finger. “You know, the video? It’s for my little brother.”

  “Yeah, right. Over there.” I point to the far wall, the latest addition to any record/CD/video store, a menagerie of colorful piñatas swinging overhead. “We got ’em all.”

  Oh, yeah. We’ve got a two-foot table boasting the end of my youth, leftover albums, the bottom of the barrel. It’s all that’s left and nobody stops to look, to mourn, to pay respect. I arranged them such that Joni Mitchell is the one looking out on the dreary day. I imagine someone coming in from the street and saying, “Oh, I get it, paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” but no such luck; there is no joy in Mudville.

  I try to make myself feel better. I think of the positive factors in my life. I recycle my cans and glass and paper. I ride a bike instead of driving a car. Though my old man and I don’t see eye to eye, I know that I’ll never turn to find him with a gun pointed my way like Mr. Gaye did to Marvin. I sleep peacefully, all bills paid, no TV blasting MTV like the one across the street in the cinder-block house where a couple of girls come and go. One of them is nice-looking in a kind of Marlene way, wears gym clothes all the time, no makeup, hair long and loose. Though I know sure as hell if I slept with her she’d get up and put on lipstick and control-top pantyhose and ask me why I don’t cut my hair and get a real job. It’s the luck of the draw, and my luck is lousy. “Give up the Diet Coke,” I had told Betts. “Give up the fluorescent foods.” I had told Marlene to give up the self-pity; if she wanted to be somebody, then to stop talking about it and be it. I had suggested to Xan that she give up the body hair. I told the boss to be different, not to cave in to all this new crap. The bottom line? Nobody likes suggestions. So why am I supposed to be different?

  “What can you tell me about the Byrds?”

  My heart leaps up and I turn to face the purple-haired squeaky-voiced girl who has placed The Little Mermaid on the counter and has a twenty clutched in her fist.

  “Yeah? The Byrds? Like ‘turn, turn, turn?’”

  She looks around, first one way then the other. Then she looks back at me, face young and smooth and absolutely blank. “The pink ones,” she squeaks and points upward where flamingo piñatas swing on an invisible cord. “How much?”

  I watch her walk off now, her pilgrim shoes mud splattered as she heads through the construction area, her pink bird clutched to her chest along with The Little Mermaid. It’s times like this when I start thinking I might give my dad a call and say, “I know you’ve been saying how you want me to take over your business some day.…” It’s times like this when I start thinking about Marlene, when I start forgetting how bad it all got. I do crazy things like start to imagine us meeting again, one more try at this perfect 1970 romance. Like maybe I will go to work for my dad, and in my off-hours maybe I’ll get out the old power saw and make my mom a TV table (just like you’ve been saying you wanted, Mom), and maybe I’ll circumcise the old index finger and end up in the emergency room, and I’ll look down a row of plastic chairs and there she’ll be. It’s not the perfect fantasy, but it’s one I have. It’s one that more and more starts looking good after I watch Marvin’s music revived by a bunch of fat raisins dancing around on the tube, or after I see a series of younger and younger women arriving at my door in their spider hose and stiff neon hair, their arms filled with little plastic squares, a mountain of CD covers dumped on my floor.

  Dysfunction 101

  My friend Mary Edna goes out every night of the week. She has a few drinks and then dances until they close the door of Roy’s Holiday Lounge. It’s on I-95, so she’s forever meeting folks passing through town. One day she dances with somebody from Dixon, Illinois, and then it’s Richmond, Virginia, and of course she has a steady batch from the army base just an hour away. Once she met somebody from Saudi Arabia (she said Saudia Arabia), and she talked about that for weeks, as if touching his dark hairy hands (her description) had linked her to lands and histories unknown, like he might be an oil sheik and come a calling again. Lord. She wears their towns like badges, remembers them better by the sorts of details that a tourist might remember than she does hair or eye color (she does always provide that information as well, though it’s clear after years of this that she is not a choosy woman). I suggested once, in a moment of sarcasm, that she get one of those big maps and start sticking pins in it, like all those richer-than-thou folks who have in mind seeing every square inch of the planet. I said, “You can get different colored pin heads—fast dancer, slow dancer, smoker, joker, poker, toker, and any of the above.” She claims that the only time she ever slept with one of her late-night acquaintances was with the one with cancer who had never had oral sex. It was on his list of things to do on earth—it was right under “see the Grand Canyon” and right above “eat snails and frogs in a French diner.” She sure can pick them.

  I have tried on many occasions to adopt Mary Edna’s children; I feel I might as well, since all those nights their mama is out playing around, they are here at my house taking bubble baths and doing their homework. They stare at me with round brown eyes while we sit around my kitchen table, all three of us in footie pajamas. I rent movies like Thomasina and The Parent Trap and Old Yeller, and we eat big bowls of ice cream with Hershey’s syrup, just like I did when I was a kid—like I did with Mary Edna beside me in the house on Fourth Street, my grandmama’s house. I thought the two of us would grow up to catch the world by its tail like a comet, and now I look at us and wonder what on earth happened. I told her just the other day that this was what I was wondering, and she asked, who did I think we were, those idiots who committed suicide in hopes of riding a comet? I realized right then that we did not have the same memories and never would. We were two girls with so much in common, and yet we had walked away with such different messages; hers was find a man, any man, and mine was find a decent man—a kind, smart, hard-working, loving man, with something on the brain other than what is edible, and if you don’t find him, stay by yourself and get a few friends at the SPCA.

  What did Mary Edna and I have in common all those years? We were the two girls at school who were not in what the teacher called “a traditional home.” Every time that phrase was spoken people turned around in their seats and stared at us. Mary Edna grinned and waved at
everybody like she might have been the home-coming queen, but I hated those moments. I kept saying to Mary Edna, “That kind of attention is not good,” but she didn’t hear a word I said. She believed then (as she still does) that any attention is better than nothing. And she got plenty of attention with botched-up marriages and unwanted pregnancies, one drug bust and one shoplifting scene (two padded bras and a lime green dickey from J.C. Penney). I told her I would have given her the money, maybe not for that ugly dickey, but for practical underwear items that she needed, yes, I’d’ve bought those. I told her that while she was out getting herself all the attention that she missed as a child because her parents were do-nothing alcoholics, her own children were suffering. But again, she did not seem to hear.