Home from the Vinyl Cafe

by Stuart McLean

  Paul Chalmers was not the first man in Stephanie’s life. Love first came to Stephanie the summer she was fourteen. It came in the form of a tall, long-haired, strong-faced, thirty-eightyear old television producer. His name was Cameron Flemming, and he lived with his wife and two children on the same street as Stephanie. That summer Stephanie would take the newspaper onto their front lawn before supper and sit on the stoop, pretending to read, so she could be outside when Cameron Flemming walked by her house on his way home from work.

  One afternoon when Sam had set up a lemonade stand, Cameron Flemming stopped and bought a glass of lemonade. As he put his glass down on the card table, he smiled at Stephanie. She felt herself flush. She was in love with him. The world was perfect because he was in it.

  One evening he stopped and asked if she could babysit. Stephanie felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. It was his birthday, and his wife wanted to take him out to dinner. Stephanie said, “I took the babysitting course at school. I have a certificate.” She was trying to sound sophisticated.

  She arrived at his house with that month’s Reader’s Digest. “I’m going to read when the kids are in bed,” she said. She thought this would impress Cameron. She was wearing her favorite pair of jeans and a sweater that was too large for her—she liked the way the arms hung over her hands and covered her fingers.

  His wife was upstairs. Cameron was sitting in the kitchen with his youngest boy in his arms. He threw the boy in the air and caught him over his head.

  He reached out and touched her arm. “Nice sweater. It’s a sweater for walking along a beach in the wind.”

  She said, “I love the wind.”

  When the kids were in bed, she ignored the Reader’s Digest and wandered around the house imagining what it would be like to live there with him. There was a picture in his bedroom of him standing beside his wife. They were on a beach. The wind was in her hair. Stephanie opened the frame and slid the picture out. With her heart pounding, she found a pair of nail scissors in his wife’s bureau. She took out her bus pass and cut her picture out and taped it over his wife’s face, putting the altered photo back in the frame. Then she lay on the bed, his bed, and closed her eyes, pretending she was asleep. When she opened her eyes, she saw herself in the frame, standing beside him, the wind in her hair.

  The phone rang. She ran to get it, and then one of the children called. Stephanie forgot about the picture until it was too late—until after the Flemmings got home and were standing in the living room. Stephanie was putting her sweater back on, and Cameron Flemming was saying, “I’ll walk you home.”

  She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t think of any reason to go up into their bedroom to retrieve her picture. So she didn’t do anything. When she got home, she thought of killing herself. Instead, she stopped sitting on the lawn in the evenings. No one ever said anything about the picture. But the Flemmings never asked her to babysit again.

  Grade ten was Doug. Stephanie kept a Doug book in her bedroom. She wrote poems to Doug and kept a list in the back of the book of all the things that made Doug cool: his sneakers, his backpack, the way he carried his backpack, the things that he probably carried in his backpack, his ski jacket, his earring, his ears, how he opened his locker, the things he probably had in his locker, his hair.

  When Doug had a science project and was going to the library after school, Stephanie made up a project so she would have a reason to go to the library, too—but she didn’t give him her work the way Jessica Aims did. Jessica gave Doug her math homework every lunchtime. Stephanie thought this was contemptible. Though she wished he would ask her.

  One day at lunch, Doug said Oasis was contemptible, and Stephanie panicked and prayed that no one would tell him that she used to like Oasis. Had liked them in fact until that day. It never occurred to her to defend her taste.

  The Doug period of her life ended abruptly in the spring when Stephanie left her backpack in the gym and someone found her Doug book. Whoever it was tore out the back page and taped it to her locker. It was up for two periods before she found out about it. There were eighty-four entries of Doug coolness for everyone to read.

  Paul had arrived this September. He sat directly in front of Stephanie in history. They were doing Canada. Again. By Halloween they were at Louis Riel. Again. And Stephanie knew everything there was to know about Paul’s neck.

  She had memorized his neck. She would know his neck anywhere. As Riel rode toward oblivion, she thought, For the rest of my life, I will know this neck.

  She joined the debating team. So did Paul. She didn’t even know she liked him until November, when he was away one Monday and stayed away for the rest of the week. The next Monday, when he still wasn’t back, she began to worry. She was worried that he would never come back.

  She couldn’t ask anyone about him, or they would figure out she liked him. All she could do was worry. In history she stared at the empty space in front of her where his neck should have been. She wrote his name on a piece of paper and then wrote her name below his and crossed out the letters that they had in common. She got an E and an A in their first names. When she added their last names, she got an S, an N, a T, an H, and an M.

  She counted off the letters left over. “Love, hate, friendship, marriage. Love, hate, friendship, marriage.” She got “friendship.” In math, she worked out that if she cheated and used his nickname and her middle name, she got “love.” She was startled by how pleased that made her. She wrote over his name, again and again, “Love, hate, friendship, marriage,” until it was a blue smudge. She didn’t want anyone to be able to read what she had been doing.

  That night she phoned his house and hung up before anyone answered. She phoned again an hour later, and this time got his mother on the second ring. She hung up again.

  Then Becky Toma had a Christmas party. Paul and Stephanie danced together all night.

  On Wednesday after supper, Sam and Stephanie had a huge fight.

  Dave and Morley were in the kitchen. As the screaming escalated into slamming doors, Dave made a move toward the stairs.

  “No,” said Morley. “Don’t. If the audience doesn’t show up, the actors go home.” She was making coffee. “They love each other. These are battles for affection.”

  Half an hour later, when things were quiet, she went upstairs. Both the children’s doors were shut. She knocked on Sam’s first.

  “Hi,” she said. “Do you want a cookie?” He was lying on the floor moving trucks around.

  In the room next door Stephanie was on her bed, reading a magazine.

  Morley said, “Do you want to go shopping? Tomorrow after supper?”

  Stephanie said, “Sam has my toothpaste.”

  Morley said, “Oh.” She bent over and picked up a white blouse off the floor and hung it on the back of a chair. She was thinking maybe they could go somewhere and get a pair of chinos and a blouse for Stephanie.

  Stephanie said, “I don’t want to go shopping.”

  Morley sat on the edge of the bed and reached out to touch her daughter’s hair. “I was thinking,” she said, “that you might like something for Saturday night. For the dance.”

  Stephanie pulled away from her mother. She rolled over. “I’m going to wear one of Dad’s white shirts and my black jeans.”

  Morley said, “But your black jeans are ripped.”

  Stephanie said, “I’m going to have long underwear on.”

  It was a look that Morley hadn’t considered.

  When Morley was sixteen, her mother had a dress made for her for a school dance. It was made by Elsie Steppich, a seamstress who was married to the caretaker of their church. The dress was sleeveless. It had layers of mauve chiffon over purple silk. Her mother said it was a wonderful dress. It probably was—for a forty-five-year-old woman. When Morley put it on, she felt like she was playing dress-up. The material at the front was all gathered, puckering together to a center point so it looked like she had a massive target on her chest, with a
bull’s-eye engulfing her breasts.

  Morley was so horrified that she could barely speak all night. She found the darkest corner in the gym and stayed put, sitting on a bench with Elenore Pepper, who had a huge nose. Morley went to the girls’ room once and stared at herself in the mirror, but when she heard other girls coming down the hall, she locked herself in a stall and waited there, her feet lifted off the floor, until they had left and she could slip out without anyone seeing her. When Mickey Billingsley asked her to dance, she was so confused she said, “No, thank you,” not understanding that she was the only person he had asked, that it had taken him all night and several trips to the boys’ bathroom before he managed to summon the courage to approach her.

  When Paul arrived to pick up Stephanie, he was holding flowers, a bouquet of twelve turquoise and green carnations.

  “What a lovely thing,” said Morley, warmly.

  Paul looked at her defensively. “It’s Valentine’s Day,” he said.

  Morley had spent the night before helping Sam address forty-five Jurassic Park Valentines. Somehow she had disassociated that event from the actual holiday. She had forgotten it completely. So had Dave.

  Dave looked at the flowers this boy had bought for his daughter and he winced.

  Stephanie was still upstairs. Morley was struggling to make Paul feel at home while Dave glared at him.

  Paul was wearing a pair of tight black jeans, a white dress shirt, a tie, and a dark sport coat. The tie was too thin, the shirt rumpled, and the black shoes made his feet look enormous—but he was trying. Awkward, thought Morley, but sweet.

  Dave was thinking, This boy doesn’t look a bit like me. He was muscled. His hair black. His face round. Dave felt a wave of relief. He had read that if a girl didn’t feel love from her father, she would look for someone just like her father to love her. He felt liberated. He was trying hard to act naturally. He was about to ask what Paul’s parents did for a living when he caught Morley sending him daggers. Paul couldn’t have cared less. Because at that moment, Stephanie came bouncing down the stairs, and whatever it was Morley had been saying was left hanging. Paul turned away from Morley and looked at Stephanie and smiled and said, “Hi.”

  They went into the living room. Sam appeared, smirking, with a photo album and said to Paul, “Do you want to see a picture of Stephanie in a bunny costume at her ballet class?”

  Stephanie glared at her brother. But five minutes later, she and Paul were hunched over the album.

  “This is me at Halloween,” she said.

  Sam sighed with disappointment and headed upstairs.

  Stephanie and Paul were so involved with each other that the rest of the family might as well have disappeared. Paul didn’t even say goodbye to Morley, who was standing at the door as they left. He turned his back to her when Stephanie said something and walked by her as if she were invisible.

  Morley found this reassuring. It made her completely happy.

  “Love’s young dream,” she said. “What could be sweeter? That was wonderful.”

  Dave said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I thought he was too sincere.”

  Out on the street, Paul had opened the door of his father’s car, and Stephanie was climbing in.

  Morley was watching them through the window in the front door.

  “What do you call it?” she said. “That funny feeling when something nice makes you sad?”

  Stephanie was sitting beside her date now. As the car pulled away from the curb, she was feeling anything but sad. Excited, nervous, sophisticated, and, to her great surprise—comfortable. She felt comfortable beside this boy. It was a night she would always remember.

  Morley lingered by the door and blessed her daughter quietly. When she turned, Dave was looking at the bouquet of carnations. Morley looked at him and laughed.

  Everyone was so caught up in the moment that no one noticed Sam, who had run upstairs and was in his room. The lights were on, the window open, and Sam’s naked bum was sticking out into the cold night air. One last shot at his sister.

  It was good enough to be alive.

  But to be young and alive was very heaven.

  Sourdough

  Dave spent a frustrating week at the beginning of March trying to find someone who could sell him a box of the plastic disks that snap into the center of 45 rpm records.

  He had bought a lifetime supply of the disks in the early eighties from a manufacturer in Sarnia who was going out of business.

  “Just send them all,” said Dave after they had haggled for a while. “I’ll pay seventy-five dollars, plus the shipping.”

  He nearly croaked when the trucker met him in the alley behind his record store, spat, and pointed to the crate in the back of the van. The crate was as big as a refrigerator.

  “Are you sure?” asked Dave.

  “Sign here,” said the trucker.

  Dave needed the help of three friends to wrestle the box up to his second-floor storage room. This is stupid, he thought as they humped the case up the stairs. But when he opened it, he felt pleased. The plastic disks were beautiful. Half of them were bright primary colors: reds, yellows, and brilliant blues. The rest were muted tones of pink and brown with swirling tortoiseshell highlights. There were thousands. Dave dug his hands into the box and let them fall through his fingers. He felt rich.

  He bought a goldfish bowl at a yard sale and filled it to the brim with the disks and kept it on the counter by the cash register. He let anyone who asked dip in and take as many as they wanted, for free—even people who hadn’t bought a record. He figured he would never get rid of them all.

  He wasn’t figuring on Brian.

  Brian is a kid from Saskatchewan who came to Toronto to study film. He collects Hawaiian guitar music, and when he stumbled on the Vinyl Cafe, he started hanging around, always on the lookout for Dick Dale albums. Eventually, Dave hired Brian. It was Brian who invented the game they called Ringo. The goal of Ringo was to take one of the disks out of the fishbowl and flip it across the counter so it landed on the spinning turntable. One afternoon, after that had become too easy, Brian arrived with a catapult he had made out of a mousetrap. They took turns shooting the disks at the turntable from the far side of the store. The ultimate goal, never achieved—though not for want of trying—was to drop one onto the six-inch spindle.

  The mousetrap ate up a prodigious number of the disks, and one day in early March, Dave went upstairs and realized he was about to run out. He phoned all over town, but no one had any, and no one knew where he could get them. Dave finally found eight of them at one of the big warehouse record stores for $1.50 apiece. He was going to buy all eight until the salesman said, “When these go, there won’t be any more coming in,” so Dave left four behind for whoever came looking after him. It was another nail in the coffin of vinyl, and it depressed him.

  The same week, Dave got a phone call from a woman who worked at Sotheby’s auction house in London. She called twice a year to ask if Dave would consider selling some of his collection of rock memorabilia. He didn’t want to sell anything, but after she told him some of the prices that things had brought at recent sales, Dave said he’d think about it.

  “Phone in a few weeks,” he said.

  In the late sixties and through the seventies, Dave was a technical director for a lot of big groups. Although a lot of them weren’t big when he worked with them, some of the people he traveled with became famous. In the storeroom above his record store, where Dave had his now nearly empty crate of disks, is one of the largest collections of rockand roll memorabilia in North America.

  The day the lady from Sotheby’s phoned, Dave went upstairs with Brian after lunch. The storage room was dark. It smelled like a summer porch that had been closed for the winter. Dave flicked on a light switch and bent to pick up a shirt lying on the storeroom floor. It was purple.

  “Did I ever tell you how Jimi Hendrix got kicked out of Little Richard’s band?” he said as he held up the shirt in fron
t of him. “He wore this onstage one night.” Dave folded the shirt absentmindedly. “No one wore purple onstage except Little Richard.”

  He was looking around for a place to hang the shirt. He dropped it on a pile of boxes.

  “Little Richard made his comeback right here in Toronto, at that rock-and-roll festival where Lennon played.” Little Richard wanted to look sharp for that show, so he had a mirrored vest made. “I have it somewhere.”

  Dave was standing directly under the bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling in the middle of his storeroom.

  “That’s Dylan’s set list from the 1965 Newport Folk Festival,” he said. He was pointing to a piece of paper with a handwritten scrawl thumbtacked to a pillar. He reached for it and knocked over a stack of cartons. “I don’t know why I keep all this stuff. I should sell it.”

  “Whose guitar?” asked Brian.

  “Which one?” said Dave.

  “The Saturn,” said Brian.

  “Hound Dog Taylor’s,” said Dave.

  Brian had the guitar around his neck. “Did he really have six fingers?” he asked.

  Dave had picked up an envelope off the floor. “You know what this is?” he said.

  Brian shook his head.

  “This is the film—no, not the film. These are the negatives from Margaret Trudeau’s camera from that weekend with the Rolling Stones.”

  “What weekend with the Rolling Stones?” said Brian.

  “Look at this,” said Dave. He was holding a negative up to the light. “This one will never get published.”

  Brian was fiddling with a cigarette case.

  “That belonged to Leonard Cohen,” said Dave, slipping the negative back in the envelope.

  Brian opened the case. “Love from M,” he read. “Who is M?”

  “Marianne. Do you like it? You can take it if you want.” Dave wanted to get out of there. He was standing by the door, his hand on the light switch.

  That night Carl Lowbeer called and asked if Dave could do him a favor. Carl and Gerta lived down the street. They were going to Florida for a month. Would Dave look after their sourdough starter while they were gone?