by Yvonne Prinz
I leap up the wide, sagging wooden steps to our house, passing Pierre on his way out. He pretends not to know me. Pierre is our cat, although I’m sure he doesn’t see it that way. Even as we were rescuing him from certain death at the animal shelter when he was a kitten, he seemed to have complete disdain for us. We decided that he must be French: hence the name.
I yank open the front door and drop my skateboard in the foyer next to a Chinese urn filled with umbrellas that my mom steals from restaurants. I smell exotic spices, which means Ravi is here. My mom and Ravi are sitting at the big French farm table in the dining room with mugs of chai in front of them. My mom bought this table after my dad moved his drum kit out of our dining room and into Kee Kee’s house. The dining room had never actually been used for dining before, and we left it empty for a long time, detouring around the big empty space, not sure how to deal with it. The table arrived one afternoon but we didn’t actually sit down at it for months. We stood next to it and looked at it a lot, running our hands along the smooth grain of the old wood. Pierre liked to groom himself on it and stretch out in the afternoon sun. Then my mom came home with two old wooden chairs she found at a garage sale and we started eating the occasional meal sitting at it instead of cross-legged on the kitchen counter or standing over the sink or lying in the bathtub. Now the table is a part of us. We like it. It’s amazing how much crap you can put on a table and still find room to eat. I often wonder where we put stuff before the table appeared.
Ravi is a professor of literature at UC Berkeley. He’s writing a book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn and my mom is his research assistant. Ravi is the classic rumpled-professor stereotype. He wears a threadbare tweed jacket that smells of wet wool and the same corduroy pants year-round. His salt-and-pepper hair falls into little curls at his collar, and his disheveled beard often has crumbs of food in it. He grew up in New Delhi but he’s British educated, so even though he looks rumpled, he’s always unnecessarily formal. He nods at me when I walk in the door and his dark, expressive eyes wrinkle into a smile.
“Miss Allie. How are you today?”
“I’m good, Ravi, how about you?”
“I’m very good today,” he says, pulling strips of fruit leather off a roll. “Your mother has just given me this delicious sweet snack made from apricots.”
My mom rolls her eyes at me over her laptop computer. Ravi travels through his life somewhat oblivious to any form of pop culture, but when you introduce him to something new, he’s all over it. You have to appreciate that naive enthusiasm.
Ravi spends a lot of time over here because his apartment is teensy, and once my dad left and the massive table arrived, it seemed to make more sense that they work from here. Ravi has written four books and he’s won all kinds of literary awards, but it seems to make no difference to the way he lives his life. He doesn’t seem to need much to make him happy. He reads books almost every waking moment of his life, and I don’t think he has a lot of friends outside his little academic world. My mom likes working for Ravi because she can poach a lot of the research she does for him for her own half-finished dissertation. I also think she likes Ravi. He’s a nice person in a bumbling, neurotic sort of way. He’s like an East Indian version of Woody Allen.
“Oh, and, Miss Allie?” he remarks. “Thank you for the Tchaikovsky. You’re right: It’s outstanding, the finest recording of the unfinished symphony that I’ve ever heard. I don’t have any idea how I’ve lived so long without it in my collection.”
“You’re welcome, Ravi.”
“There’s tea on the stove,” says my mom.
“Thanks.” I wander into the kitchen. The pot of chai sits on the gas. My mom buys the spices in Little India on University Avenue and then she slow-cooks it with the milk and sugar on the stove like they do in India. Ravi taught her how to do this and to my mom it’s culinary quantum physics. It’s the only thing my mom knows how to cook. I take a mug from the cupboard and pour the fragrant steaming milk into it. I hold it up to my face and inhale. It’s glorious, nothing at all like Starbucks.
I balance the mug on a stack of LPs I “borrowed” from Bob & Bob’s and make my way upstairs, stopping in front of Suki’s door. I press my ear against it and listen for signs of life, a habit I developed soon after she moved in. When my dad moved out, my mom decided to rent out his old office to a student. We cleaned it up and painted the walls a soft green. My mom put an ad in with student housing and Suki arrived on our doorstep the next day. She looked to weigh about ninety pounds soaking wet, and she really was soaking wet. It was pouring rain and she had no raincoat or umbrella. We showed her the room, she signed the lease, and my mom handed her a stolen umbrella on the way out.
She moved in a week later with her meager belongings and, although she shares a bathroom and the kitchen with us, we never see or hear her. We’ve never even heard her so much as flush the toilet. Curiosity got the better of us one day and we broke into her room while she was at school. My mom insisted that it isn’t technically a break-in if you have a key and you suspect foul play. I’m not sure what she meant by foul play. Someone who never makes a peep would seem like the opposite of foul to me. I expected something monastic, and it was rather spare, but Suki had everything she needed in that tiny room: A hot plate and packets of miso soup and green tea were neatly laid out on an empty suitcase on the floor. A tiny desk with her computer and a small collection of books sat up against the only window, and a tidily made futon was rolled out on the floor with a clock next to it. A plain wood-framed mirror hung on the wall with a snapshot of a smiling Japanese family tucked into its frame. Her clothes were lined up in a neat row in the closet. We closed the door and felt incredibly guilty for being such busybodies. We accepted Suki’s ghostliness after that, just as she seemed to accept our tendency to shout at each other and play weird music at all hours.
I carry the chai into my room and set it down on the desk next to the chaotic jumble of wires and components that I call my stereo system. I suppose that system might not be the right word. None of my pieces came from the same place or even the same era. I have an ancient Technics turntable. I prefer it to the one I grudgingly got recently with a USB plug for making mixes. I have a newish Sony CD player, four Infinity speakers I inherited from my dad, a set of enormous headphones that look like the Professor from Gilligan’s Island made them out of coconut shells, and a Pioneer amp that looks very mid-eighties to me that I bought at a garage sale for ten bucks. It’s a mess to the naked eye but, after years of my tweaking and moving and adjusting, the sound quality is finally magnificent. Two entire walls of my room are lined with wooden cases filled with vinyl LPs, a collection that consumes my thoughts.
I flip through the stack of LPs from Bob’s and decide on a European import of David Bowie—Young Americans. I slide the vinyl LP out of its jacket, holding it with my fingertips. I love the look of vinyl, the smell of it, the tiny crackles you hear before the song starts. I place it on the turntable, click on my amp and lower the diamond needle on the first song. The honky-tonk piano and sax intro to “Young Americans,” possibly—no, definitely—one of the most amazing songs ever recorded, starts up. I arrange myself on my bed with the album cover and my mug. I sip the chai and lie there watching Bowie watching me in all his airbrushed, androgynous perfection. Cigarette smoke curls around his painted fingernails. He dares me not to fall in love. I close my eyes and listen.
As I’m flipping the record over to the B side I hear my mom saying good-bye to Ravi at the front door. She comes up the stairs and leans far enough into my room to lower the volume on my stereo.
“Hey, I’ve got that thing tonight,” she says, running her fingers through her long brown hair and letting it fall onto her shoulders. She looks tired. “I think I’ll wear my Nicole Miller.”
“Good. I like that dress.” I smile at her.
“Would you mind taking your sneakers off the bed? That’s gross.”
I kick one Converse onto the floor and then the
other; they land with a clunk on the rag rug next to the bed.
My mom has recently started roaming the vast and perilous sea of love known as internet dating, searching for her intellectual equal. When it comes to men, my mom’s at a bit of a loss. She fell in love with my dad when she was nineteen. He was drumming in a band called Fool’s Gold, a retro-Byrdsy, vocally heavy group. They sounded a bit like the Jayhawks. My mom was in the first row, a pretty college girl with a tan and a wide smile. My dad was smitten. Now, at forty-two, my mom says she refuses to give up on men just because Dad turned out to be a huge disappointment. She’s taken a sort of “someday my prince will come” attitude to surfing for love, and I hate to discourage her, but I just don’t think it works that way. My mom’s already been on two dates with toads. The first one was with a guy who listed reading and opera as two of his interests. He made a reservation at Chez Panisse for dinner and my mom ran around like a schoolgirl getting ready for her prom, trying on every piece of clothing she owns. She was home two hours later. Jeff didn’t read much beyond the sports page and the backs of cereal boxes, and he’d never actually been to the opera. He was quick to mention that he did write a tax-deductible check to the San Francisco Opera every year on behalf of his business, which had something to do with bilking retirees out of their retirement money. Turns out he was getting his sister-in-law to respond to my mom’s emails because he wasn’t much of a writer (duh). He snapped his fingers at the waitress at Chez Panisse and that was it for my mom. She pretended to have a migraine and excused herself. She was back from the second date even faster, looking pale, and she wouldn’t talk about that one. Now she asks for IQ scores. She’s not leaving the house for anything less than one twenty-five. For one forty, she’ll even shave her legs. Tonight’s date is a civil engineer, a freshly divorced transplant from the Midwest with an IQ of a hundred and twenty-eight, or so he says. Who wouldn’t lie about their IQ score? And besides, smart doesn’t always mean nice.
Mom reappears in my doorway in the dress, a simple black sleeveless thing that makes her look like the opposite of who she is. She turns around and shows me the back.
“How does my butt look?”
“Good. You might want to consider a thong, though; you have VPL.”
“VPL?”
“Visible panty line.”
She moves to a mirror on top of my bureau and cranes her head around, straining to catch a glimpse of her butt.
“I can’t wear one of those things. They’re like medieval torture devices. Why am I supposed to look like I don’t wear underpants? Wouldn’t a man assume that I have underwear on under this?”
I shrug. “I dunno. It’s complicated.”
“Do you own a thong?”
“Nope. Kit has one in every color, though.” Kit’s lingerie collection mystifies me. My collection is not a collection and it could easily belong to an eleven-year-old boy.
My mom spins around and adjusts her breasts in the mirror, fussing with her bra straps. I watch her, thinking, Shouldn’t that be me? Shouldn’t I be the one fussing over what to wear on a date while my mom looks on and gives sage advice?
“Tell me I’ve at least got this part right. I just spent fifty dollars on a new bra.”
“You look great. Almost hot.”
“What are you going to do tonight?” she asks me, still working with the bra.
“Nothing much. I’m kind of tired.”
“Do you feel okay? You want me to cancel?”
“You wish. No, Mom, you have to go. What if he’s great?” I try to look hopeful for her.
“What if he’s not?”
“Only one way to find out.”
My mom sighs and starts to walk out of my room, her shoulders sagging. Her high heels clack against the hardwood as she walks, leaving divots. At my door she stops and turns. “If this one is horrible, that’s it. I’m done.”
“Good attitude.”
She grimaces and clacks down the hallway like Dead Man Walking.
I watch out my bedroom window as my mom takes the porch stairs gingerly in her heels and heads up the street toward the wine bar where her alleged prince awaits. The irony of this role reversal isn’t lost on me: me watching from the window like a worried mother as my mother heads out on a date.
I take off David Bowie and replace him with the Sex Pistols—Never Mind the Bollocks. I crank the volume and take the stairs two at a time, arriving in the kitchen in time to see a spider scuttling across the countertop. He’s one of the black ones. We have three kinds in the house: the black ones, which are the scariest, the translucent white ones, which can easily be mistaken for small dust bunnies, and then the dangly-legged ones that do push-ups when you try to touch them. I wonder what the different colors do when they run into one another; do spiders have turf wars? Or do they all live a harmonious existence in our house, respectful of one another’s space? God knows we’ve got enough bugs for everyone in this place.
“I’ll let you live if you promise not to get any bigger,” I tell him. He disappears between the stove and the fridge.
I pull a frozen mushroom pizza out of the freezer, a small ice cave, badly in need of defrosting. I kick the refrigerator door shut with my foot, balancing on the other one to lean over and turn the oven on. I execute a series of complicated pseudo-ballet moves that I made up, over to the cupboard for a glass, keeping perfect time to Johnny Rotten’s ragged vocals as he belts out “Holidays in the Sun.” My plan is simple: pizza, a little light dinner music while writing a blog update including my plan to take over the world, and a movie—I have my choice of several that I borrowed from Bob & Bob’s but I’m leaning toward On the Waterfront, an enduring classic, and then, if my mom’s not back, a little pacing of the floors, but somehow I get the feeling she’ll be home in time for the end of the movie. She loves Marlon Brando like I do.
Chapter 3
At five a.m. on Saturday morning, my eyes fly open and I’m wide-awake. Ideas are rushing into my brain at a very high rate of speed. I slide out of bed and walk barefoot across the creaking floor and into the hallway. My mom’s bedroom door is shut. She’d better be alone in there. I didn’t even hear her come in last night. I go back into my room and turn my computer on. Here’s the plan: Not only will my blog contain a powerful mission statement and a daily LP blog, but every week I’ll post my top five vinyl picks. Readers will be encouraged to participate in that. Plus I’ll publish a Vinyl Princess fanzine anonymously and distribute it to the world through Bob & Bob’s and a mailing list that I’ll compile through the blog. It’s brilliant. I start in on the mission statement:
Welcome to my blog. I am The Vinyl Princess and I am devoted to the preservation and sharing of music in LP form. I have spent countless hours searching for the very best music available on vinyl and I am committed to keeping it safe, sharing it with you and keeping it real. Are you a vinyl junkie too? Share your thoughts with me; share your music with me. You are home. Corporate rock still sucks; downloading is harmful to music and other living organisms.
Music is love.
VP
I put the Elvis Costello quote below that and then I work on the fanzine till I can’t see straight. It’s only a few pages long but I figure I’ll try to put a new issue out each month and, naturally, it will get longer each time. I’ll finish it when I get home from work and then take it over to Krishna Copy and print it out. I grab my still-dirty jeans off the floor and pull them on. I search for my bra in all the likely places (under the bed, on the bathroom floor, in with my extension cords) and finally give up and yank a black Stray Cats T-shirt over my head (I am able to go braless, part gift, part curse). While I brush my teeth I wet my free hand and try to arrange my hair into something besides a woodland creature perched on my head. I pull on my sneakers, dash downstairs, pour myself a bowl of cereal and pound it. I’m late.
The weekend scene on the avenue features a whole different kind of shopper. At Bob & Bob’s we call them “B and Ts,” which stands
for “bridge and tunnelers”: suburbanites who venture in from the far-flung suburbs over bridges, through tunnels, along endless freeways to participate in the urban experience, get a tattoo, score some drugs and look at the freaks, who purposely act extra-freaky, hoping for handouts.
Some Saturdays, there’s a preacher on the corner across the street from the store quoting scripture into a microphone, trying to save some souls. He’s got the haunted look of an ex–drug addict or a Vietnam vet. As his voice escalates, his face turns red and the veins in his neck pop out as he waves his thin white arms and works himself into a frenzy. Dark circles of perspiration form in the armpits of his short-sleeved shirt as he alerts all sinners who pass by that the time has come to take Jesus Christ into their hearts. He can’t seem to stress enough that we’re running out of time before we’re all doomed to eternal damnation, but he’s been standing on the corner for years and nothing much has changed. No one around here pays too much attention to the Jesus guy. Sometimes I wonder what he does on the Saturdays he’s not on the corner. Maybe he mows his lawn or goes to the movies or maybe he has an alternative spot for saving souls.
My only job on weekends at Bob & Bob’s is as cashier and phone answerer. There’s not much time for anything else; the B and Ts are a needy bunch. There is hand-holding involved. The hours fly by and I answer the same basic questions all day long. “Where’s the new Pink, Beyoncé, Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani, Nickelback, Lil Wayne?” The answer to that question is, “Right behind you.” We keep a rack of CDs right at the front of the store filled with everything that the B and Ts could possibly want or were brainwashed to want by MTV and VH1 or Clear Channel. They have no business in the bowels of the store.