Spin

by Colleen Nelson

  “Which ones?” I’m always curious to hear what other DJs are using.

  Lou rattled off some obscure bands and singers. “She’s got like twenty thousand followers, Dad. It’s good exposure for the store.”

  Dad nodded like he knew what Lou meant. We’d tried explaining how social media worked, but it was lost on Dad. Just when he had Facebook figured out, we’d moved on to Instagram. Anyway, he still thought sticking flyers under windshield wipers was effective marketing.

  Having DJ Erika in the store, even for just one set, was a golden opportunity for me. I’d gotten a lot better since the last time she’d played at the store. I glanced at Lou. “If I gave her one of my mixes, do you think she’d listen to it?” I asked.

  That was the toughest part about DJing: finding out if I was any good. With my headphones on, I thought my mixes rocked, but it was kind of like singing in the shower. I’d put my music up on Mixcloud, an electronic sharing site, so DJs could comment. Every time someone wrote something positive, I got a little thrill; maybe my mixes were as good as I thought they were. I was a rookie compared to DJ Erika. My fan base consisted of Dad, Lou, Maya, and Jeremy. But performing live was what I wanted to do; it was the best way to connect the music to people. I loved watching YouTube videos of other DJs, mentally recording how they commanded the booth. I was ready to give it a spin. Pun intended.

  “Jeremy says you’re getting really good.” I smiled at Lou.

  Jeremy’s opinion mattered, although it was biased. Lou’s best friend, he’d taught me the basics: beatmatching, syncing, sampling, phrasing. They all took practice. I’d spent a lot of hours at the turntables lately perfecting my skills.

  “He wouldn’t say you were good if you weren’t,” Lou said with finality.

  “You should do it, Dizz,” Dad piped up. “That’s how your mom got her start.”

  Lou and I both looked at him. He continued as if he hadn’t just dropped the M-bomb. “She had a demo CD that she used to hand out to everyone, even people not connected to the music industry. Just to get her voice out there.”

  I waited for him to tell us more. Dad had met Georgia Hay, a.k.a. Georgia Waters, in a band. He played sax and she was the lead singer. The first band broke up, so they started another one, eking out an existence in cheap apartments and on a diet of cup-noodle soup. Dad said he knew Georgia had something special from the first moment he heard her sing. Together, they criss-crossed North America and then Europe, settling for a while in Switzerland and living in a village in the mountains, where I was born. I couldn’t imagine Dad being content in a remote place like that, but he said he was. They’d wanted somewhere quiet to raise us. Dad said they’d been happy. For a while.

  And then, she’d split. Ditching out one afternoon when I was about a year old. I imagined it sometimes, Dad calling out into the empty house, the realization dawning on him as he went from room to room, opening the closet to find nothing but dangling hangers and her suitcase gone. Dad said he didn’t know what had made her leave that day. There hadn’t been a fight, no big blowout that would have made her angry enough to leave. He figures their life had just been the wrong fit for her. And if she was too scared to admit it, maybe it was easier to just leave.

  She didn’t become famous right away; it took years. Dad moved back to Canada, scraped enough money together to buy the building, and raised us as a single dad. He didn’t know where she’d gone. With two little kids to look after, his musician dreams were snuffed out as Georgia’s took off.

  I can’t imagine what it must have been like that first time he realized who the new, up-and-coming musical sensation named Georgia Waters was. She became a household name with the release of her first theme song for a blockbuster movie. Like in a fairy tale, she went from obscurity to being someone everyone knew. Billboards, posters, the radio — the woman who’d disappeared from our lives had suddenly become inescapable.

  Biographies gave a brief description of her years touring, but they didn’t include us. As far as anyone knew, Georgia Waters was an overnight star whose talent had kept her at the top of the charts for the last ten years. Her rise to fame was legendary, but the two children and the man she’d left behind were a dark secret. And the reason she left: a mystery. One that had stayed buried all this time.

  - 4 -

  Lou

  I scrolled through some old tweets. We’d had a lot of musicians perform in the store lately. Lots of acoustic sets and DJs, too. Dad and his friends jammed here all the time, setting up in the middle of the store and going at it: sometimes in the middle of the day, if the mood was right, sometimes late into the night. A couple years ago, it got me thinking: Why couldn’t we do the same thing with a DJ? In the end, it had worked. We’d built the booth at the back, bought second-hand equipment, and lined up DJs for our Friday Night Spin. Dad liked that it brought in a younger crowd. I liked connecting with musicians. Social media made that all possible, and now I got as many requests to play at our store as I sent out. They weren’t big names, but someone like DJ Erika was on her way up. It was like music karma; I let them perform, gave them a stage, and they returned the favour, saying good things about us and asking to come back.

  I used to get a thrill from setting up the gigs, but the shine’s worn off a bit. Kind of a slog now, the back and forth, making sure things are set up properly. Since I graduated last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s next for me.

  I thought working at the store after high school graduation would make my future clear, give me an idea of what I wanted to do. Instead, things had gotten foggier. Some days, I didn’t even leave the building. My friends visited me here and I lived above the store. Sleep, work, eat, repeat. The year hadn’t turned into what I thought it would. I was in a holding pattern.

  As evidenced by the stack of books under the counter. Every book I’d read since school ended was in the pile, except for a few from the library. At first, it was cool to see how high it would get, but now it was depressing. I wanted to kick the pile over. It was almost touching the top of the counter. That was like eighty books. Nothing to be proud of. It meant I’d been sitting behind the counter long enough to read that much. Each one was another minute, hour, day “logged on the slow road to a meaningless existence.” That line is from my all-time favourite book, The Elders of Warren.

  Was I gonna be the guy with a Jerry Garcia beard hanging out in this place till I died? Surrounded by towers of books tracking all the wasted days I’d spent here? Dad had the smarts to start the store, get it fixed up. People must have thought he was crazy moving with two little kids into this area. But he could see the promise of the neighbourhood. He did all the work himself, which explains the plumbing and wonky electrical, but he made something. I’m just riding on his coattails.

  The store was Dad’s dream, not mine. On days when I had to work a long shift, I dragged myself out of bed, counting down the hours till I’d be done. Till I’d be free. I’d never told Dad. He counted on me and Dizz to put in our hours, but he must have been able to see it on my face.

  Sometimes I thought about taking off. I could go out west to the mountains and work at a ski lodge. But I wasn’t a mountain kinda guy. A couple other friends were saving up to backpack in Europe, but that didn’t grab me either. Sounded like a lot of money to go to places I could read about. I was trapped here, “in a cage of my own creation.” That was another line from The Elders of Warren. Aldred, the good-guy magician, got his wand turned on him by the dark lord. His last spell was a cage that trapped his attackers. In the book, a fairy disguised as a beggar freed Aldred. Chances were slim that would happen to me. I needed a plan, a way out, or I may as well invest in some tie-dye shirts and stop shaving.

  - 5 -

  Dizzy

  I fit the headphones onto my ears, snug. I’d saved up forever to buy them. They were Sennheiser, just like the pros used. The band hung at the nape of my neck so it wouldn’t get tangled up in my hair. With one record on each turntable, I ra
n my fingertips along the ridges that trapped words and music until the needle released them.

  There was lots of debate between DJs about which was better: vinyl records or digital music. But I lived in a record store, as if I even had a choice. Dad would have disowned me if I’d picked downloaded music and used a computer to do all my mixing.

  There was a knock at the door. Right on time, Jeremy had arrived. He gave me a wave and an impish grin through the glass.

  I pulled the headphones off my ears, set them down, and went to let him in.

  “Hey, Dizz. Spinning?”

  “Just about to start.”

  Jeremy slung his jacket over the cash desk. He looked at me through his trademark black-framed glasses. Maya called Jeremy’s style “grandpa geek chic”: cardigans, button-down shirts, sometimes a tie, beat-up Adidas runners, and usually a bag slung across his body. He’d been trying to grow a scruffy beard, too, but with little success. A few whiskers grew sporadically over his chin. Dad called it peach fuzz, but Jeremy was adamant it would come in fuller.

  Some people were book nerds, like Lou; others obsessed about video games. But not me and Jeremy. We could spend hours listening to each other DJ.

  I took my place behind the tables and slipped the headphones back over my ears. With the flick of a few switches, the turntables hummed to life. I started with a record I’d used before, an old party song from the ’80s, and mixed the beats so the song morphed into a current song. The singer’s voice soared over the track, and I kept her voice levelled and mixed in another song underneath. It was a bit of a trainwreck in some spots, but when I was finished, I looked at Jeremy.

  I raised my eyebrow. “What did you think?” I asked, prompting him.

  “That you’re gonna be playing your own gigs soon,” he said with a laugh and came behind the DJ booth. “Hey, can I show you something?”

  I nodded. He reached over and took the headphones off my neck. A tight ringlet got stuck in them and I winced. “Sorry,” he said, gently teasing it loose. Reaching around me, he used the pitch fader to adjust the tempo and started to spin the jogwheel. Instantly, the beat of the record sped up.

  “See? Better, right?”

  I nodded.

  “When did you know you were ready for your first gig?” I asked.

  “I didn’t. I mean, it was kind of an accident. My brother had some friends over, hanging out in the basement, and someone asked me to spin. It was kind of a joke, cuz I was young, but everyone was drunk, so I thought, why not? They won’t remember in the morning anyway.” He gave me a lopsided smile. “But when I got up there, it was like the best feeling. To hear the music coming out of the speakers and have people right there, feeling it.” He shook his head. “It’s addictive.”

  “I had an idea,” I started. It was kind of crazy, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. He looked at me expectantly. “That maybe I could open for DJ Erika.” Giving her a USB with my mixes was a good idea, but I wanted to try getting up in front of a crowd.

  Jeremy raised his eyebrows in surprise. I saw doubt in his face, too.

  I’d seen Jeremy behind the turntables lots of times. He turned into someone else, into DJ Beatmatch, his fingers flying over vinyl and faders, spinning and bouncing with the crowd. He felt the music as much as the audience did. That was what I wanted. “There’s no fun in practising. I want to get in front of a crowd. I’ve been getting good comments on Mixcloud —”

  “Yeah, I know. People like what you’re posting.” Jeremy looked at me, a little dubious. “Guess you’ve got to try it sometime.”

  “Exactly!” I bumped him out of the way so I could show him some of the albums I’d unearthed in Dad’s office. I played him a few samples, waiting to hear his opinion. We talked excitedly about which songs would work best, and I could see him warming up to the idea of me taking the turntables on my own.

  “Hey, Jer.” Lou appeared behind us in the doorway that led from the store to the kitchen upstairs.

  “Hey, man.” Jeremy gave him a chin nod and went back to checking out the albums.

  Lou perched himself on the stool Dad used for jamming and pointed to the turntables. “Come up with anything good to give to DJ Erika?”

  “Actually —” I tossed a look at Jeremy, who nodded encouragement “— instead of just giving DJ Erika my mixes, I’m going to open for her.”

  Lou frowned at me. “You’re ready for that?”

  “Yeah,” I said quickly, not leaving any room for doubt.

  “There’s going to be a lot of people here.”

  “That’s sort of the point.” I started to second-guess myself. What if I messed up, with all those people watching? I’d never get the guts to play again. It wasn’t like singing in front of a crowd, where my voice was the only variable. With DJing, there were so many moving parts to consider: equipment failure, bad song choice, software malfunction, missing a beat, misreading the crowd.

  Jeremy grinned at me. “He’s messing with you. You’ll do great.” And he shot Lou a look like he should shut up. Jeremy checked his phone. “I better get going. I have a project to finish for a class.” Since he’d graduated with Lou, Jeremy had been taking a graphic design course at a college in the city. Lou teased him that it was him and a bunch of other guys in cardigans and black-framed glasses sitting around talking about different fonts and azure blue versus turquoise. But the posters that Jeremy had been designing for the store were proof of his talent.

  Jeremy put on his jacket and let himself out, hunching against the cold of the outside. “See you tomorrow,” he called.

  As I tidied up the records, Lou’s eyes darted around the store. By the front door, there was the cash desk, always a mess of papers, invoices, and records that needed to be shelved or mailed out. Dad’s “filing system” was more like an untamed beast. All over the walls were posters, lots signed by the musicians. Against each wall were bins of alphabetized records by genre. We had lots of disagreements over where certain artists should be categorized. Dad called it an art; Lou thought it was a science and that we should follow what other record stores did. Along one wall were listening booths that looked like old phone booths, soundproof with one turntable and a pair of headphones inside. Customers could stand and listen to a record before they bought it.

  “You ever wonder what we’d do if we didn’t have the store?”

  “Lou.” I gave him a warning shake of my head. I’d come downstairs to work on mixes, not to have an “existential conversation,” as Dad called them. Sometimes I felt like Lou’s brain was a hamster on a wheel. He was one of those kids at school who was super smart, but if he didn’t like the class or the teacher, he just didn’t try. He couldn’t fake being interested in things and it wasn’t in Dad to force him. How could he, anyway? Lou used to beg to be homeschooled, but Dad always said no. Told him a high school drop-out, like he was, wouldn’t make much of a teacher.

  “Just wondering,” he said and got off the stool, scraping it across the floor. The store was like the fourth member of our family, someone we cared for and talked about. But when Lou asked a question like that, it was usually because he was wondering what we’d do if we didn’t have the store. “It’s kind of like an anchor, though, don’t you think? We’re stuck here with it.”

  I shook my head. “No —”

  “Just saying,” he interrupted. “Life would be different if we didn’t have it. We’d be free to do whatever we wanted.”

  “This is what I want.”

  “That’s cuz you don’t know any different.”

  “And you do?” I asked, exasperation growing.

  He raised an eyebrow and pushed his toque farther off his forehead. “I don’t want to be stuck here my whole life, that’s all I’m saying. Dad saw the world before he bought this place. And then, he only bought it so he’d have a place for us to live.”

  “Dad’s happy here. So am I,” I replied, wondering where this conversation was going.

  H
is eyes drifted around the store again. “Guess it’s just me.”

  “You’re not happy?”

  He shrugged. “Can’t really put my finger on it. I feel stuck, I guess. Same ol’, same ol’, you know?”

  “Dad would understand if you got a job —” He cut me off with a wave of his hand.

  “Yeah, I know. You know what? Pretend I didn’t say anything.” With a sigh, he stood up. But as he walked upstairs, I saw the drag in his feet.

  - 6 -

  Lou

  I watched Dizzy as her hands flew between the controls. Kinda made me jealous to see how good she was getting. Jeremy had tried to show me the ropes, but I didn’t have the patience for it. I’d rather listen to music than make it. I wish I was good at something like Dizzy. The music gene completely skipped me. I like music, don’t get me wrong. I live and breathe it — reggae especially. But to play it? Man, I got nothing! No game at all! Kind of pathetic considering who my parents are.

  The real reason I came downstairs was to tell Dizzy about the concert. Just announced: Georgia Waters was playing in the city. I wanted her to hear it from me first, before she read it online or someone told her. The concert was next month, but tickets had just gone on sale. Maybe it was a late addition to her schedule; it was her second-last show. From here, she went to Montreal for the final stop on her Love’s Lost Tour. Dad’s eyes flashed at me when I told him. I’d checked it out online, curious about the tour. Was there a reason she’d added a show in the city close to us? He tried to play it cool, but I saw his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed over and over, like his mouth had suddenly gone dry. How can you still care about her after all these years? I wanted to ask him, but didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t affection that flashed across his face. Maybe it was something else. Hurt? Anger? Surprise?

  The last time she played in the city, she came to visit. I was eight. I remember she was tall, almost as tall as Dad, and when she sat on the couch, she sat right in the middle. Dad prodded me to go sit beside her, but I resisted, stubbornly standing across the room, watching her. She was a stranger, even if she was my mom.