There was a record store in the Mid-Western town in which I grew up that would never open until 12:00 or 1:00 pm. It was different pretty much every day. I don't remember if the hours were actually posted on the door. If they were, then they were to be taken with a grain of salt. On the occasional unpredictable day, without notice or acknowledgment, it wouldn't open at all. God, it was a cool place. The guy who worked behind the desk was a huge asshole. Nobody knew whether he was the owner or an employee, although either way, he was the only person who was ever seen working there.
When I set about recapturing the guy's physical appearance, I think: tall, late 20s/early 30s; dark brown hair and eyes that were just a tad bloodshot; scuffed-up, tight brown corduroys and a ratty, hooded sweater of muted blue, casually baggy on his once-skinny frame. Maybe he had tattoos somewhere; somewhere his girlfriends could see. Did girls like tattoos?
To customers, particularly to we awkward teenagers, he spoke rarely and in brief statements and always disinterestedly. He didn't want -- it seems -- to be bothered. This made a certain amount of sense, considering that he was constantly on the phone, having the lewdest, most shockingly frank conversations with someone -- was it always the same person? -- about sex and drinking.
"Yeah, so I met up with fucking what's-her-name, and she fucking -- her fucking tits were just all like, fucking...there. And I'm like... So, we fucking did some shit, and we... And I fucked her. Yeah so, but anyway."
Was he talking about drugs, too? We didn't really know, because we didn't hear any references to the conventions and accoutrements of drug-use familiar to our brand of well-adjusted-if-disaffected near-north-suburban teenagedom. I mean, was he talking about...like...heroin or something? The mind would race at the mere mention: imagining the apparatus, the hardware; aren't stoves and blowtorches involved? Were the etiquettes of its commerce and consumption the same as in pot culture, except with the shady characters shadier and the music better and you get to do it to art school girls in short hair and tights?
We didn't understand the references in half the things he was saying, and for some reason this not only made him seem scarier, but it also made him seem infinitely cooler. He was an ogre-aesthete.
I remember the small store, square-shaped and high ceilinged, on a tucked-away corner of two tucked-away streets, the building's spartan front steps of cracked concrete, jutting out, diagonal and rectangular, its windows taped up with xeroxed posters and darkened halfway down by venetian blinds at three-quarters tilt. It was always summer there; sometimes, it was autumn.
It was completely intimidating to file through the massive collection of used LPs in his presence, because one of my friends got yelled at once for handling one of them incorrectly. It was a weathered old gatefold copy of Trespass, a very early album by Genesis -- the original, Gabriel-fronted version, of course. My friend learned on this occasion that this lush, atmospheric study in languid 12-string acoustic guitars and simmering Hammond organs -- somehow, simultaneously gentle and apocalyptic -- was the owner's/employee's favorite album of all time.
On a later occasion, in reference to this encounter and the unexpected revelation it produced, the same friend of mine asked the owner/employee whether he was a fan of so-called progressive rock in general. The owner/employee, caught off-guard in an interval between dirty phone conversations, and immediately regretting having opened the door to this little cretin and his chummy, credulous small-talk, said: No.
Whereupon, if I recall correctly, my friend pressed him further. What kind of stuff do you like? he wanted to know. With my friend's sally of impertinence already well underway, the owner/employee endeavored to staunch the hemorrhaging of his authority by producing the most ponderous answer he could muster. According to my friend, it may or may not have included references to free jazz, New York punk, Zappa, John Addams, Sibelius. (I don't remember.)
It seemed like he was an inhabitant of the same parallel universe from which came the spectral, silent white-skinned girls in zig-zag clothes and costume jewelry that always seemed to blink into my focus during the half-waking middle sections of parties. Who were those girls? I wanted to know that universe's impossible, aching melancholia, that menace and that violence. The power to obliterate oneself.
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