by Yvonne Prinz
Minutes after I swing open the doors at ten thirty, Zach from New York walks in carrying a well-used Bob & Bob bag.
“Allie.” He smiles. He looks relieved to see me. “I heard there was a little trouble over the weekend.” He sets the bag carefully on the counter in front of me, after brushing it off with his hand and then wiping his hand on his pants. His hair is especially animated today, jumping off his forehead abruptly in a tidal wave, as though he slept on his face.
“Yeah. You need some credit?”
“Oh, yeah.” He pulls two LPs out of the bag. “These two were a little disappointing.”
“Okay.” I grab the credit slips pad and start to write out a credit for him.
“So, were you here when it happened?”
“Yes, actually, I was.” I keep my head down.
“Man, I thought stuff like that only happened in New York. Do they have any suspects?”
I look up at him and it suddenly occurs to me that he was standing right next to Joel in this very spot, days before it happened.
“No,” I reply. I look at him evenly.
“Well, don’t worry; they’ll catch them. These guys always mess up sooner or later.”
I look back down at the credit slip.
“Hey, you know, I’ve been meaning to tell you. That day at the flea market, when you told me to buy that Flaming Lips LP, you were right on about it. That record is flat-out cool.”
I manage a smile.
“Are you okay?”
I shrug and bite my lip. Why am I always a mess around this guy?
Then he does something really strange. He leans over the counter and squeezes my shoulder. I really wasn’t expecting that, especially not from him. Somehow it brings my emotions even closer to the surface. I blink back tears.
“Hey, don’t worry. It’s really okay to be freaked out for a while. My friend in New York? His apartment got robbed and you couldn’t even look at him for a whole week without him bursting into tears. It was mostly because they took his comic book collection, but still, it’s not easy. You feel violated.”
I nod. “Yeah, I guess that’s it.”
I hand him his credit slip and he takes it, carefully folds it, origami style, and slides it into his thin wallet. He starts to leave.
“Hey, aren’t you going to shop?”
“Can’t right now. I’ll be back later. See ya.”
Did I just ask this extremely annoying person to stay? Has it really come to that?
I check my email. Elliot from New York has already gotten back to me. He wants me to send him my logo and he’ll take care of the rest. He’s going to set it up so that you can access my old blogs by date or alphabetically by band or artist’s name. He says that all I have to do is mention that he designed it with a link. Cool.
Bob arrives around noon, wearing his darkest sunglasses, which indicate his worst possible mood. He wears sunglasses like mood rings. Dao trails behind him and stops to tell me in her broken TV English that the store has insurance but there’s a one-thousand-dollar deductible, which hardly makes it worthwhile, since there was only nineteen hundred dollars in cash in the register that night, and if they make a claim the insurance will go up. I suppose that now is a bad time to tell Bob that Jennifer called and she’s decided to take a few days off due to a bad case of posttraumatic stress disorder. Laz told me he saw her table-dancing at a bar on San Pablo late Saturday night. I’m sure it’s part of the healing process.
The afternoon drags. The atmosphere in the store fluctuates between gloomy and despondent. I work on my five LPs of the week: the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Session (four out of five LPs); The Doors (five out of five LPs); Morrissey’s Viva Hate (five out of five LPs); Little Feat, Time Loves a Hero (four out of five LPs); and Tom Waits, Frank’s Wild Years (five out of five LPs).
Late in the day, Zach reappears with a CD case in hand. He places it on the counter in front of me. Could it be a mix CD, the mating call of the romantically challenged? Please. Let it not be that.
“What’s this?” I ask, picking it up. There’s a giant moth on the cover. It looks like he cut it out of a National Geographic magazine.
“A mix CD. I made it for you.” He beams.
“Hey, thanks. I’ll listen to it tonight.”
“Cool.” He stands there a moment. Awkwardness sets in. “Okay, so I’ll see ya.”
“Yeah. See ya.”
He starts to leave. “Oh, by the way, there’re two guys in wedding dresses out front.” He walks out the door.
Almost immediately, through the window, Shorty and Jam appear in wedding wear. Jam is wearing a flowing white satin dress with a modest train and embroidered roses on the bodice. A veil is bobby-pinned to his greasy, stringy hair. The fact that he’s missing a front tooth isn’t helping. The hem of the dress is already black with dirt. Shorty is wearing an off-the-shoulder bridesmaid’s dress with a full skirt in coral. His bony shoulders jut out like coat hangers, and his dirty jeans and oversize boots emerge from underneath the cocktail hem. The dresses look all too familiar to me. It takes me a moment to realize that they belong to my mom.
I pick up the phone and dial my home number.
My mom picks up on the first ring. “Hello.”
“Hey, whatcha doin’?” I ask.
“Cleaning out my closet.”
“Getting rid of some stuff?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you put some things in the free box?”
“Yeah, two whole garbage bags.”
“Well, I guess that would explain the two drug addicts out in front of the store, parading around in your wedding dress and that hideous bridesmaid’s dress you wore at Aunt Shirley’s wedding.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Does the one wearing the bridesmaid’s dress at least look better in it than I did?”
“Only slightly. God, Mom, your wedding dress in the free box?”
“Oh, who cares? I just need to move on with my life. Besides, I’ve always hated that thing.”
“Okay, well, I’ll see you later. In the meantime, I’ll be down here, not moving on. I’ll be watching a low-rent, creepy, drag-queen version of your wedding.”
“Sorry, honey.”
I hang up the phone and watch Shorty and Jam pass a bottle of something back and forth.
My parents didn’t get married until I was five. I was the flower girl. I cried during the ceremony because I saw my aunt Shirley crying and I thought we were supposed to. The minister had a long beard and dark glasses. He was a yoga instructor. He scared the crap out of me. It wasn’t until the reception that I realized that it was supposed to be a celebration. I threw up wedding cake on my white patent-leather shoes.
I know what it means when closets get cleaned out and old, once meaningful bits of our lives get discarded. The last time it happened was right after my dad moved out. My mom purged herself of anything even remotely reminiscent of my dad. She put everything into garbage bags (I went through them later and rescued some cassettes and a Black Sabbath T-shirt) and then she sat next to the phone, waiting for him to call and tell her he’d made a horrible mistake. He never did.
I’m guessing, in this case, she’s waiting for a call from Jack. The answering of the phone on the first ring was a dead giveaway. It’s funny that my mom got rid of every connection to my dad after he left but she hung on to the wedding dress for a while. Isn’t it a custom that moms sometimes hang on to the dress because they think their daughter might wear it at her wedding? Has my mom already given up on my love life? Is she assuming I’ll never marry?
Jam takes a drunken swing at Shorty. I exhale slowly.
When I get home from work, I have to step over several garbage bags of discarded clothes lined up in the front hallway. My mom and Ravi are working at the dining table. Ravi has taken his transformation one step further. All his facial hair has disappeared, revealing a strong, smooth jawline, and he’s wearing another new shirt
in crisp striped cotton. He looks fresh and youthful. The lack of facial hair makes his eyes look enormous. My mom’s eye, on the other hand, is still swollen halfway shut and she looks like she could use a shower. She’s wearing sweats and a torn gray T-shirt. Her wedding dress goes in the free box but this outfit she hangs on to? The scene looks like a reverse Beauty and the Beast.
“Hi, Ravi.”
“Hello, Miss Allie,” he says.
“You look good, Ravi. Sort of like your own younger brother.”
He blushes. “Thank you.”
I look at my mom. “Your wedding dress is filthy. I hope you’re happy.”
She glares at me out of her one good eye. I stomp up the stairs to my room to call Kit.
“So. Did you call the cops yet?” asks Kit for the fourteenth time today.
“No. I can’t. I mean, I will . . . I think . . . Damn!” I try to speak quietly into the phone.
“Even after yesterday? C’mon, Al, the guy’s a hardened criminal.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Uh-huh, I do. And I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to say this out loud, but he’s dangerous and he knows you know. You have thought of that, haven’t you?”
“Of course I have.” Nonstop, actually. I’ve also thought about the way he took such an interest in me that day at the café, the way he told me all those stories and listened to me talk about my life, such as it is, pretending to care, the way he moved my hair out of my face. It’s unbearable for me to come to grips with the fact that he was just setting me up. He didn’t seem at all dangerous that day. He seemed like a lot of fun. I keep hoping that there’s a chance that I’m wrong about him and that maybe it wasn’t him that night. I keep hoping that maybe none of this actually happened. But, unless I can sell myself on an evil-twin theory, I don’t have much.
“Look, let’s do this together, okay? We’ll go down to the police station tomorrow morning and tell them what we know.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know . . . Okay, yes, let’s do it.” I squeeze my eyes shut, hiding from the decision I just made.
“Good. Look, you’ll feel better when it’s done. You know it’s the right thing.”
“Okay, okay. Let’s stop talking about it or I’ll talk myself out of it again.”
“Sure. By the way, Niles called me today and I actually picked up. He wants to talk to me.”
“What did you say?”
“I said he was talking to me and he said, ‘No. In person.’
“I said I didn’t think it was a good idea and then he begged me. I think he may even have cried. Apparently, and it took him a while to figure this out, probably because he couldn’t get past her breasts, but he recently came to the conclusion that Chelsea is an idiot. Imagine my surprise. From where I was sitting she radiated intelligence. Anyway, he says she’s moved on already. She told him she was happy to keep seeing him but it wouldn’t be exclusive because she’s sort of into drummers now.”
“Wow.” I don’t really see how this story redeems Niles in any way but I decide to keep that to myself.
“Yeah, all boobs, no brains.”
“So, will you see him?”
“Yes. I told him to meet me at Café Dirt tomorrow night.”
Café Dirt is what we call the coffee place on the corner of College and Ashby because you can smell the bathrooms while you stand in the coffee line. Gross.
“You think you’ll give him another chance?”
“I dunno. I really don’t.”
I love how Kit’s convinced that Joel belongs on death row, but Niles she’s considering pardoning. Is there any doubt that love is truly blind?
“What time tomorrow morning? Should I pick you up at your house?”
“Yeah, um, how about ten?”
“Okay.”
“Fighting crime on our day off, how fun. Whatever will we do afterward, buy a Batphone?”
I try to laugh but I can’t. “See you tomorrow,” I say.
I hang up the phone and flip through my vinyl till I find Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. I put it on the turntable and sit on my bed with my eyes closed, listening. It would be nice if there were a sign that I’m doing the right thing. Kit’s giving Niles another chance. Should I be giving M a chance to turn himself in? Who am I kidding? That’s not happening. It’s time to let go of the fantasy M. I think about the dream again, how I’m letting go of his hand, letting go of him, letting him fall.
I suppose a dream is as good a sign as any.
I sit at my computer and type in my blog address. As I’m waiting for it to load it occurs to me that my blog has become my soft place to fall. I’ve succeeded, finally, in finding a group of friends (sure, they’re in cyberspace but they’re real people) who’ve also been looking for a place to connect. I’ve started noticing that the same people check in almost every day, plus a bunch of new ones. Forty-three people have responded to the Last Waltz blog and it’s only been posted for twenty-four hours. They’re waiting like eager children, waiting to see what I’ll talk about next. I’ve decided that I’m going to charge a fifteen-dollar subscription fee for a year’s worth of Vinyl Princess fanzines. The postage is killing me, especially to Europe. Anyway, vinyl collectors are used to getting money orders because they’re always buying records through the mail. I have to start thinking about next month’s issue. It’s going to be bigger and better in a whole bunch of ways. I’ve also decided that I’m going to produce six issues a year. I can’t knock one out a month. I’ll lose my mind.
My Berkeley Fan has posted a new comment. I’ve started going to his comments first (and yes, I sure hope it’s a guy).
VP,
I bought The Last Waltz at a tiny record store in the East Village when I was fourteen. That was a tough year for me but I think it helped. I bet I listened to it five hundred times. Somehow I knew you would get to it.
I see my light come shinin’
From the west unto the east,
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released.
Thank you.
Your Fan in Berkeley
The East Village? That means he’s from New York. I think about Zach and then quickly dismiss the thought. No way.
Chapter 16
There are only a handful of scenarios where you might find yourself at the Berkeley police station on a Tuesday morning. The obvious one is that you’re escorted in wearing handcuffs because you’ve done something very bad. Another scenario is that you’re the victim of someone else’s very bad thing and you’re here to tell someone about it. Finally, there are the friends, relatives and loved ones of the person who’s done a very bad thing who’ve come to pick them up or bail them out. There’s a tragic element to every one of these scenarios.
Looking around, I see very few of our kind sitting in the waiting area: that is to say, two teenage girls holding decaf mochas, casually dropping by to offer evidence in an ongoing robbery investigation. Although the tragic element exists, it’s a little harder to spot in our case. It seems to me, though, that the longer you’re inside the station, the more tragic things become.
Immediately upon walking through the doors, I felt a sense of guilt wash over me. Maybe that’s why people confess to crimes they haven’t committed. It’s not them; it’s this place. Now, standing at the reception desk, I have half a mind to confess to the robberies myself. I’ve called ahead and Officer Davis assured me that we should “come on down to the station,” but no one seems to know where he is, so we’re forced to take a seat on a wooden bench and inhale disinfectant and desperation while they locate him. We try to avoid eye contact with our benchmates, who regard us suspiciously. Even a toddler sitting on his mother’s lap gives us the stink-eye. A man across the hall is hunched over a pay phone, having a protracted conversation with his wife or his girlfriend.
“Look, baby. . . . Okay . . . I know I said that but . . . No, this is it, I promise. . . . No, you can’t do that. . . . I own half of it. . .
. How will I get to work? . . . C’mon, baby . . . if you could just come and get me. . . . No, I know . . . but I mean it this time. . . . I love you. . . . No . . . don’t hang up. . . . Baby . . . don’t hang up! . . . Hello? . . .” He bangs the receiver against the phone and walks away, leaving it dangling.
While we sit there waiting, I start thinking about Reggatta de Blanc, by the Police. Great record. I walk up to the front desk and write it across my palm with a pen attached to a chain. I must blog about that album; it’s so cool.
Finally, Officer Davis appears, wiping his hands on a paper towel. I imagine him scarfing down a submarine sandwich in the janitor’s closet, ignoring his pages.
“Allie?” he asks, looking from me to Kit and back to me again. He has no recollection of who I am. You have to wonder if he’ll ever make detective with his unbelievably bad eye for details.
“That’s me.” I wave my hand.
“C’mon back.” He holds open the low wooden gate that separates us and we walk through it. We follow him up the stairs to a large room filled with desks that looks remarkably like the set of NYPD Blue. Officer Davis points to two chairs in front of a desk with his nameplate on it. We take our seats and he eases himself into a leather chair on wheels behind the desk and rifles through a stack of files in his inbox till he locates the right one. There’s a photo in a frame sitting on his desk: a woman with a fat kid on either side of her, one boy and one girl. They’re all wearing Mickey Mouse ears and Goofy is standing behind them with his arms around the group. I imagine Officer Davis was the photographer.
“So.” He looks at me. “You remembered something else about the robbery?”
“Yes, well, sort of. I actually know who did it.”
“You do?” He looks dubious, like maybe he thinks I’ve been watching too much CSI on television.
“Well, I have a first name for one of them—Joel, probably an alias,” I say, attempting cop talk, “but I have a good description of them. We both do.” I look at Kit, who nods vigorously.