Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  “There isn’t a Country section in the store,” said Dave flatly. “I don’t have a Country section.” He was waving emphatically at the hundreds of signs hanging over the boxes of records. “There is no Country,” he said.

  When he hung up, he rubbed his eyes.

  Brian was sitting beside him.

  Dave said, “Where would you file a country record?”

  “We don’t have a Country section,” said Brian.

  “I know,” said Dave. “But if you were filing a country record, where would you file it?”

  “Depends,” said Brian.

  “On what?” said Dave.

  “The artist,” said Brian. “Living or dead?”

  “Dead,” said Dave.

  “Accident or murder?” said Brian.

  “I don’t know,” said Dave.

  “Accident . . . I’d look under Skid Marks or the Never Fly at Night section. Murder I’d check, probably Surprise.”

  “What about natural causes?” said Dave.

  “No one dies of natural causes in country music,” said Brian.

  Dave normally filed country records in one of two sections.

  They were the Grand Old Orgy and She Was So Sixteen. If it was hurting music he logged it under She Never Loved You Anyway.

  Dave spent two days looking for Geechie Wiley. “What about Take This Jail and Shove It,” said Brian helpfully, after they had looked everywhere they could think of.

  “I’ve already checked,” said Dave.

  He never found a Country section.

  “Well, I had one,” said Ken, when Dave called him again. “It was near the back.”

  Dave looked for another day. Then he gave up.

  “I keep thinking of that sleazebag from London,” he said. “Do you remember him? He spent two days in here. He had a computer printout and a thick catalogue. He was smirking when he left. He was through the cash register at least ten times.”

  “Possible,” said Brian. “But maybe it’s still here.”

  They both looked out at the thousands of records.

  “Maybe,” said Dave.

  That was seven years ago. Sam was only three years old the last time Dave had seen the Geechie Wiley record. Now Sam is in school—grade four. Any way you cut it, seven years is a long time. The seven-year itch, the seventh-inning stretch. They say every seven years your body replaces every single cell. After seven years there is nothing left of you.

  Dave went through many stages with Geechie Wiley. First he blamed himself for leaving it lying around and sank into a pool of self-loathing. He was convinced a collector had spotted it and bought it when he wasn’t in the store.

  Then he decided that Ken, that fastidious little tidy-up clerk, knew all along what the record was worth and had swiped it when he fired him.

  For a while he allowed himself to believe the record was still somewhere in the store, and that one day it would surface. As the months passed he thought of it less and less, wondering about it from time to time when he was alone and feeling wistful. But when he told the story of how it had slipped through his fingers, he was eventually able to tell it with humor, and these days when he told it, the joke was on him.

  And now the kid had come back. And he was standing there in his blue suit and his yellow tie, and what was he saying? He was saying, “I can’t believe your store is still here. Everything else has changed,” he said. “But this place is exactly the same.”

  Dave looked around the store. He pointed to the lamp by the cash register.

  “The lamp is new,” he said. “I got that for my birthday, maybe three years ago.”

  “I remember that lamp,” said Kevin. “You’ve had that lamp for at least seven years.”

  “We got rid of a lot of the eight-tracks,” said Dave. “I don’t buy eight-tracks anymore. Except for the Partridge Family. Not that anyone is offering.” The boy kept smiling as he looked around.

  Seven years. He was a man now, not a boy. He said, “I’m not married anymore. Do you remember Lisa? We got married. But it didn’t work. She left. After three years. She said that I hadn’t grown up. We didn’t have kids. You have three, right?”

  “Two,” said Dave.

  “You can make a living at this?” he said, waving his arm expansively around the store.

  “Depends on what kind of living you want,” said Dave, glancing at the cellphone Kevin had put down on the counter. He didn’t finish the thought.

  Kevin picked up the phone self-consciously and slipped it into his pocket. “For work,” he said. Then he added, “I’m going to look around, okay?”

  When he came back to the counter he was carrying five albums. “Rock Lobster,” he said holding a record up. “Rock Lobster. This might be the copy I sold you. I haven’t heard this record for seven years.”

  “Do you still have a turntable?” said Dave.

  “Somewhere,” said Kevin. “Lisa took the CD player. I didn’t buy a new one. I haven’t had music for four years. Well, the radio.”

  “You had some nice records,” said Dave. “I remember.”

  Kevin dropped Rock Lobster on the pile of records. “How much?” he asked.

  “They’re on the house,” said Dave. “There’s no charge.”

  It was blood money. Dave owed him for the Geechie Wiley. “I never gave you a wedding present. This is for the divorce. It’s a starter set. You’ll be back for more.”

  They both smiled.

  “But this time,” said Dave, “choose a girl who likes records. Okay?”

  Dave walked with him to the front of the store. Kevin looked at his new records as they walked. Dave reached out and took his elbow to steer him around a milk crate.

  Through the door Dave could see Emil, a neighborhood street person, standing on the other side of the street, scratching his back awkwardly.

  Dave said, “Wait a minute,” and went back behind the counter.

  Dave has always opposed giving Emil money. He and Morley have argued about this. “You give him money and he buys lottery tickets,” says Dave. “You might as well throw the money away.”

  Dave slipped five twenties out of the cash register and slid them into an envelope. He turned around so Kevin couldn’t see what he was doing. He sealed the envelope. The kid didn’t need the money he owed him, but Dave had a debt to get rid of.

  “See the old guy across the street,” he said.

  “Blue coat?” said Kevin. “Scratching?”

  Dave held out the envelope. “Would you mind giving him this? Don’t tell him where you got it.”

  Emil is crazy. In kinder times there would be a place for Emil. In these times there is the stairwell across from the record store. Mostly Emil inhabits a strange and unreachable world. Sometimes if someone says, “Hello, Emil,” firmly enough they can pull him back from that world, and he will stop talking to himself and answer. Often he won’t hear. Occasionally, he might spot people before they spot him. They are daydreaming, lost in their own world, and they walk by him without noticing, and Emil will call out, “HELLO,” loudly and pointedly, leaving them wondering what the hell just happened.

  That night, after he locked up, Dave walked across the street to see Emil. He was sitting on the sidewalk holding a wad of lottery tickets. Fifty, maybe more.

  “What have you got there, Emil?” said Dave.

  “Guy gave me a hundred dollars,” he said, waving his handful of tickets. “I’m going to win the lottery. Again.”

  Dave stared at the tickets. Emil was so excited he hadn’t recognized him. Dave turned to head home. “Good luck, Emil,” he said. “Good luck.”

  The Bare Truth

  Bert and Mary Turlington live in a spacious, semi-detached, brick house two doors away from Dave and Morley. They have been neighbors for twelve years. Although their children are different ages (Adam Turlington two years younger than Stephanie, the Turlington twins two years older than Sam) they have spent, if not a lot of time together, enough time—on
the street, in each other’s backyard, on various neighborhood and school committees—to appreciate each other’s neighborly presence. They would not, under other circumstances, have become friends. But they are neighbors, and because they are neighbors, they have become friendly.

  Bert Turlington is a criminal lawyer. Dave admires Bert’s flippant self-confidence and enjoys the stories Bert loves to tell about his dodgy clients: Captain Hydroponic, the engineering student caught with two houses full of marijuana; Rudolph the Rastafarian, who spent his entire trial obsessively highlighting a battered copy of the Old Testament; and No-Neck Norman, part-time fence and full-time fink.

  Bert had met No-Neck on the witness stand when the cops had brought him in to rat out one of Bert’s clients. Bert had tried unsuccessfully to shake No-Neck ’s credibility for two and a half days.

  “If I understand it right,” said Bert to No-Neck, “you are a professional liar?”

  “THAT’S RIGHT, COUNSELLOR,” growled No-Neck proudly in his alcohol-ravaged rasp.

  “And a professional thief ?”

  “THAT’S RIGHT, COUNSELLOR.”

  “He was such an ugly and appealing S.O.B. that I knew the jury believed every word he said,” explained Bert. “In the end I convinced my client that the best we could do was cop a plea.”

  No-Neck had apparently enjoyed their courtroom sparring. A year later he showed up in Bert’s office with a boxer who needed help.

  “WONDER IF YOU NEED A CLIENT, COUNSELLOR?” he asked, handing Bert his business card. It read Labour Consultant.

  Dave met No-Neck once—a heavy-set sixty-year-old, with a head the size of a pumpkin.

  “They don’t make them like Norman anymore,” said Bert ruefully.

  It turned out Norman had tried, on any number of occasions, to retire from the world of crime, but apparently couldn’t resist the easy money.

  “Every time he gets into trouble,” said Bert, “he bargains away the charges by ratting on someone or setting up a sting for the cops.”

  After a decade or so it got to the point that Norman had appeared on the stand one too many times. The police offered to put him in a witness-protection program, but they told him he would have to move to Alberta.

  “Norman wouldn’t hear of it,” said Bert. “He told the cops he would rather be shot at home than move out west.”

  Bert Turlington was, in a sense, a tour guide, who led Dave into a world that he would otherwise never visit. Walking the dog with Bert was as good as going to Disneyland.

  Once Bert took Dave to a boxing match in the ballroom of a fancy hotel. The room was crammed to the ceiling with eight hundred men—most of them wearing ill-fitting tuxedos and most of them smoking cigars they had bought from the table near the door where they were being freshly rolled by a Cuban woman not wearing any clothes. There were only two other women in the room, both in scanty bathing suits—one selling cigarettes and the other holding up large numbered cards between each round.

  “I’LL BET YOU DIDN’T THINK YOU COULD STILL BEHAVE LIKE THIS!” yelled Bert gleefully over the din as they settled into their ringside seats.

  Another time when he went to dinner at the Turlingtons, Dave watched a loan shark drink an entire bottle of Scotch and fall headfirst into the chocolate mousse.

  That was the night Mary put her foot down and told Bert he couldn’t bring clients home anymore.

  “It’s not as much fun as it used to be,” said Bert once. “There are more gun calls these days. And so much political correctness. The human element is going out of it. Everyone is so damn serious.”

  Bert likes to pace when he is planning his cases, and more than once, on warm summer nights when Dave has been out walking Arthur, he has bumped into Bert Turlington, and they have walked around the neighborhood like a pair of long-distance truckers—Bert kicking at the sidewalk as he tries one argument after another on Dave, who plays the role of judge and jury.

  Mary Turlington is a chartered accountant. Morley and Mary view the world from opposite ends of just about any spectrum you could imagine—except motherhood, a continuum of common ground that allows them to enjoy each other’s company.

  Dave and Mary, however, have not found a meeting ground. Dave thinks Mary is stiff. Mary thinks Dave is sanctimonious.

  “He’s a phoney,” she said to Bert one Saturday morning as she cleared the breakfast dishes. “You watch . . . he’ll be dressed like one of Adam’s friends tonight. He’ll be wearing a plaid shirt. Or something stupid.”

  Dave and Morley were coming to the Turlingtons’ for dinner that night. Morley was going to be late. She had to be at the theatre early on.

  “I could leave as soon as the curtain goes up,” she had said when Mary had invited them. “I could be there soon after eight.”

  They had agreed Dave would go earlier—around six. But now that it was Saturday morning, the prospect of entertaining Dave for two long hours without the redeeming presence of his wife didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. It was making Mary cranky.

  “It’s like he’s still in college,” she said. “The music. All that lah-dee-dah anti-bourgeois crap.”

  “I don’t think he went to college,” said Bert.

  “Exactly,” said Mary.

  Mary Turlington grew up in London, Ontario, and went to the University of Western Ontario. She was accepted at McGill and Queen’s but her family wasn’t well off, and anyway, her father, who was working in construction at the time, didn’t believe girls should go to university. Mary stayed at home and paid her own tuition. Thirty years later she was still anxious about money.

  Money was why she became an accountant. When she was in high school her guidance counsellor had made her write down the stuff that she really loved. You should do what you love, he said. She wrote, “chocolate, Columbo on TV and books.” She became an accountant so she would always have enough money for chocolate and books.

  It hadn’t turned out to be a bad choice. She liked the people she worked with. She liked the marble lobby and the gleaming windows of the office tower where she went every day. She liked the look of her business cards. After twenty-two years she had been made a partner in her firm—the first woman. She liked that. But if she was honest, if she was perfectly and completely honest, Mary would have to say that though she liked the order and comfort of numbers she didn’t like the day-to-day business of doing her job.

  But what else could she have done? Bookstores were going broke everywhere you looked. Books wouldn’t have worked out. Right? Right.

  And there was Dave, circling her life like an old lover—wandering down the street every morning in jeans and sneakers. Dave had turned his passion into a job. Why should his life be so easy?

  Dave’s antipathy toward Mary was more personal. He didn’t like her politics. He didn’t like her make-up. He didn’t like the way she wore her hair. He didn’t like the cracks she made about his record store. How would you figure out the depreciation on an ABBA album, Dave? As if he ran his store the way a doctor might run a hobby farm. As if it was nothing more than a tax write-off. Dave didn’t know what the Turlingtons earned, but he figured he and Morley couldn’t be that far behind.

  At two o’clock that afternoon—Saturday afternoon—four hours before Dave was due to arrive, Mary Turlington was about to climb into the shower. She was standing in the bathroom squinting suspiciously at a bottle of Rain Forest Nut Meat! shampoo.

  Bert poked his head into the bathroom and said he was going to get beer. Mary waved him away impatiently. She had three things on her mind: her hair, dinner and the pots and pans. She didn’t have room for Bert and beer. She had bought some gunk advertised on television that was supposed to remove the rings from around the outside of her pots. She wanted to set her hair and then try the pot cleaner before she started cooking. And the shampoo. It was new too. She wanted to try it.

  Mary has never liked her hair. Never. It is thin and brown and unless she fixes it, it hangs straight down, like I ha
ve been buried for a week, she is fond of saying.

  When Mary was a girl, her mother taught her how to curl her hair using brown paper instead of curlers. Her mother ripped brown paper shopping bags into strips and while Mary’s hair was still wet after washing, she would roll it into curls and tie the curls in place with the strips of brown paper. Mary would sleep with the paper in her hair and undo it in the morning.

  When Mary went to university, her mother gave her a curling iron. Since she married Bert she has always been the first up—so she can fix her hair alone—a sacrosanct morning ritual that he interrupted only once.

  The Nut Meat! shampoo must have been some kind of Third World joke. On the container was a promise that she would step out of the shower as if she were stepping out of a tropical rain forest, with a shiny head of lustrous hair cascading down her back. “Just shake it dry,” read the instructions, “and the water droplets will bounce away like dew.” When Mary stepped out of the shower and shook her head, her hair moved in a sodden, helmet-like clump. Like a head of matted felt. As if she had just shampooed with Elmer’s glue.

  “Damn,” she said.

  It was two-thirty. She was planning to serve paella. It was going to take her half an hour to untangle her hair. She wasn’t going to have the time to clean the pots and get dinner ready. That didn’t make her happy.

  The thought of preparing the paella in front of Dave, who would probably sit at the kitchen table with a beer and yak at her while she cooked, the thought of Dave watching her make dinner in stained cookware propelled Mary into doing something she had never done in her life. She bolted out of the bathroom with nothing on and ran downstairs stark naked. Mary had never ever been downstairs with no clothes on. Never. Ever. It’s not the sort of thing Mary Turlington does. But she was thinking that if she could get the gunk on the pots, they could season while she ran back upstairs and untangled her hair. And then she would be more or less back on schedule.

  Bert and Mary have a galley kitchen. It is small by any standards and cut off from the rest of the house by an island counter. You have to go through the family room to get to the kitchen, through the family room and past the sliding glass doors that lead to the patio, past the table where the Turlingtons eat most of their meals, past the island counter and then you are there, in Mary’s kitchen, which is not unlike being in a dead-end alley.