About four or five long blocks before the turn off Liberty, Sib was stopped at a light and spun around to see if Kieran had followed her out of Rose’s. She could make out a far-off figure in a baseball cap on an English Racer. She couldn’t tell yet if it was Kieran, but she started pumping the pedals harder, riding out alongside the curb when the sidewalk got too crowded, taking the intersections even after the Don’t Walk lights started to flash, riding through traffic with the abandon she had earlier that day in dodgeball, at the knock-hockey table, whizzing by pedestrians and weaving in and out of stopped cars that barely knew she was there before she was gone. But no matter how fast she went, she felt something, someone was gaining on her. At 88th Street, she finally had to stop because the light was red, and she turned around and saw that it was Kieran behind her, about three blocks away, the Mets insignia on the cap, now facing forward, unmistakable. He was alone, and charging.
While she waited out the light, Sib kept turning around, trying to make out the figure on the bike behind her. The light was stuck, and she was trapped. She could see now that Kieran’s mouth was moving, but in the traffic and clatter of the city, she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
After what seemed like hundreds of cars had passed, she looked to her left and felt a break in the traffic. Maybe she could make it across while the light was still red. Then she’d be sure to get green lights all the way home. She darted out into the street.
There was a gold Chevy Impala gunning toward the intersection. Sib’s legs were like pistons now pumping on the bike, a warrior’s battle. She kept turning to look at the car almost in a game of chicken. She could take it. The car seemed to slow, to be cowed by her glare. She got to the curb and lifted the front of the bike in triumph, almost into a miniwheelie, and was ready to keep going. But as the bike rose and jerked in front of her, the copy of “Band of Gold” was jostled off the handlebars and went flying. When Sib turned around to see her prize fly out of its sleeve and shatter in the gutter behind her, she also saw that Kieran was now in the middle of the intersection.
“Sib, wait!” he yelled.
The Chevy was now just a few feet away, but Kieran was going to make it. When he got to the curb, though, a woman in a housedress and slippers walking her pug appeared from around a telephone pole, and he swerved to miss the dog. A shard of the record lying in the gutter sliced through his thin front tire, and it blew. He’d been going so fast that the momentum sent him flying headfirst over the handlebars and close to Sib’s bike a few feet away. His natural athleticism should have saved him, but the graceful arc he flew in once he was in the air actually made the crown of his head, the center button of the baseball cap, hit the pavement first. His legs then swung into Sib’s bike and sent her and it down.
Soon a crowd was gathering. High above, a piano riff drizzled out of an apartment window, as the WABC D.J. Dan Ingram was announcing a new No. 1 song.
17. Queens, N.Y., July 1970
Mrs. Logan lifted the sheer curtain in the front room and looked out the window at her son pushing a mower across the lawn, swiping the back of his hand on his forehead at the end of every row. “I’m worried about the boy,” she said.
“What is it now?” Mr. Logan, in a wing chair, said, looking up from his pipe and a biography of Grover Cleveland.
“He just seems especially preoccupied today,” Mrs. Logan said. “He barely said a word at lunch.”
“He’s 14, not a guest on the Tonight show,” Mr. Logan said. “He’s not supposed to keep us entertained. Or at this point in his life even like us very much.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “He’s just always by himself. He doesn’t seem to have many friends. It can’t be good for him, this isolation. Even his room . . .”
“What about his room?”
“It always looks a little too clean. You should see his drawers. Everything in neat, folded piles.”
“You looked in his drawers?”
“Only one.” “Would you have been happier if you found dope or some girlie magazine?”
“No, maybe, I don’t know, I just, just. . . .”
“Dear, how many parents would complain about having a son who keeps his room clean and gets good grades and generally doesn’t have to be told twice to do something? He’s honoring his word to read for at least an hour in the morning during the summer vacation. He must have gotten through 50 pages of Moby-Dick today. He has his soccer and his music. Not everyone was born to be the life of the party. I’d say he’s coming along just fine.”
“I guess. But have you ever noticed how a room is always a little tidier after he leaves it, even though you never really see him doing anything? The other day I couldn’t find my glasses, and then he came into the room for a few minutes, and when he left, they were right on the table next to me.”
“Dear,” Mr. Logan said, even as he was remembering the night that he was having trouble balancing his checkbook, and then Andy appeared, asked his father to sign a paper he needed for school and how after he left suddenly the checkbook was balancing. “Shouldn’t we . . . ?”
“What?”
“Shouldn’t we just feel lucky to have him at all?” Mrs. Logan pulled a strand or two from her gray ponytail behind her ear, let down the curtain and said, “Yes, darling, of course you’re right.” Mrs. Logan knew that Andy was a good kid, and he’d always been a bit of a mystery. He arrived after she and Mr. Logan had tried for years to have children and given up. She was almost six months along before she even knew she was pregnant, figuring she was going through the change. She didn’t really think she and her husband had brought some socio-sorcerer into the world. Still, as it turned out, her maternal intuition wasn’t so far off today.
Andy had been especially bothered the last few weeks, ever since the day he discovered that girl’s voice on the radio. It was unlike any other he’d heard. Low, almost mannish, yet unmistakably coming from a girl. A hawk’s precision with the vulnerability of a baby sparrow. A world-weary naïf. The song itself was a throwaway — there was some bit about moon dust and hair — and Andy didn’t really care for all the choral waves the song rode out on. But the rest of the arrangement was so clean, so spiffy, every piano and drum fill efficient, every note of the flügelhorn leaving space around it, the sauntering beat giving the girl the perfect leverage she needed over the song, giving her room for her slightly halting cadences, for her tongue to poke gently in her cheek. It was like a break in the humidity after a summer storm, a clearing, a cleanse.
Andy was ever-discerning about the records he’d admit to his collection. He wasn’t a sloppy music profligate, like Cousin Tom, a five-spin-and-out kind of guy. When he decided to make space in his collection, in his life, for a record, he was going to take care of it, honor it, commit to it. Not consign it to some half-attended aisle next to his bed. It had to be special. The first time he heard this record, he knew he had to own it.
And the song was also the source of his funk. He’d been to half a dozen record stores, and everywhere he went, there was an empty slot. Everywhere a clerk saying they were out of it. One pit-stained, cigar-chomping, Ralph-Kramden-type store owner said, “Every teenage girl in town wants that record. And not a few teenage boys, either.” He gave Andy a smirky look. “Only they ask for it quietly.” He thought about going back to his neighborhood music shop again the next day, but then he remembered a store he’d heard about down in Jamaica or Ozone Park, owned by a fat woman who used a whip to ward off shoplifters. After he finished mowing the lawn, he got out the Yellow Pages. Rose’s Record Room, on Liberty Avenue. That was it. He’d have to take a bus and a train to get there, but if the store had the record in stock. . . .
He phoned the shop a few times, but the line was busy, busy, busy. What a wasted trip, a wasted summer afternoon it would be if he went all the way down to Jamaica and that store was out of it, too. Still, he had to have it, to play it when he needed it, not when the radio decided that for him, even if lately the song seemed t
o be on every five minutes.
After he bagged the grass clippings and cleaned up, he told his parents, who were both now reading in the backyard, that he was going out to look for a record.
“Be home in time for dinner,” one or the other said from their twin chaises, looking up from their plastic-sleeved library books. “Keep your wallet in your front pocket,” the other one said. “And don’t get recruited for anything.” Mrs. Logan thought to herself, at least he’s getting out of the house.
Andy didn’t like public transportation very much, the crowds, the close proximity, the tight clusters, but it might not be so bad getting to the store at midday. He caught the bus on the corner and found a seat with empty ones on either side. So far, so good. Space.
The subway was a different story, though. Not a seat to be had, even at a non-rush-hour time. Baby strollers, women with large, swinging pocketbooks and big hair, smelly men in polyester, bumping, staring, barely enough room to stand near a pole, the el rickety and listy as it rolled into the southern part of Queens, the train just getting more crowded, stuffier, hotter. Andy cooled himself with the thought of the song, itself a thermostat adjuster, a course corrector; it would be worth a mini-odyssey, navigating these urban Scyllas, he kept telling himself. If the store had the record, that is.
When he finally got out on Liberty Avenue, the city hit him full blast. Car traffic, foot traffic, air traffic, everything congested, noisy, fettered, fast yet tethered. People desperate to get somewhere they weren’t. A kind of stagnant urgency. After a few blocks of the crush, he began to wonder if the record was worth the trip, if maybe he could have waited a couple of days.
His first sight of Rose’s Record Room didn’t give him much hope, either. The store’s window looked as if it hadn’t been washed in weeks, the record covers inside the display years old and yellowed, the sign for the store missing half its letters. And when he walked in, his sinuses were stung by the smell of sandalwood and jasmine and patchouli, his eyes by the sight of hanging beads and psychedelic posters. So the store didn’t sell just music. It was a den for hippies, a few of whom were wandering around the place. Maybe Cousin Tom bought his records here, Andy thought.
Andy approached the counter, and behind it, there was the woman he’d heard about, maybe 400 pounds of her, mounted on a huge swivel chair, swinging a forkful of spaghetti in the air like a conductor’s baton, small splotches of tomato sauce either side of her mouth. The 45s were behind her on the wall; Andy couldn’t make out the titles from where he was, so haphazardly and lurchingly were they scrawled on cloth tape. And there was the whip, an arm’s length away from the woman, coiled loosely, lying in wait.
As Andy kept squinting at the 45 wall, the woman suddenly spoke.
“Can I help you, honey?” she said as she pulled a napkin from somewhere in the tent of a frock she was wearing. It must take her an hour to get dressed every morning, Andy thought. Yet there was something about her he liked. He heard a sweetness in her voice, a lack of hucksterism, a matronly balm that put him at ease, made him think that maybe he was right to come all the way down here after all. It might have just been part of the sales pitch, but it was effective. He asked for the record.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I just sold my last copy a few minutes ago. Something else, that record, isn’t it? There’s always one every year that I can’t seem to keep in stock. Last year it was ‘Sugar, Sugar.’ The year before it was ‘Hey Jude.’ Now it’s this song. I must have sold 100 pieces already. Girl has some voice, doesn’t she? Clear and sparkling as crystal. Like the singers of my day. If you like, I can put one aside for you when it comes back in.”
Andy had no idea when the woman’s “day” might have been; her face was so made up, her swirled hair so shiny, slickly black, her body so big, that you couldn’t really tell how old she was. And now he’d come all the way down to this smelly place with nothing to show for it. “Oh, thanks, but I don’t live around here, so I’m not sure when I could get back,” he said.
“Came out of your way, did you? I can tell how special that record must be to you,” she said. “And let me tell you, it is a special record. You know what, the young man I sold the last copy to, he’s one of my regular customers and a very nice kid. In fact, he’s still here. He just took the record in the back to the listening booth. Maybe if you asked him, he might let you buy his copy, and then he can come back for another one tomorrow when the new shipment arrives.”
Andy’s first impulse was to get out of there. He wasn’t about to go asking some kid he didn’t know if he could buy his record. If the kid was playing it in the booth now, the record would be used anyway. For a song this important, Andy wanted the first listen to the pristine copy to be his, to be able to drop the needle on the shiny, unspoiled wax, inhale those first perfect, unsullied notes. But he had to have that record, and before he could leave the store, the idea of asking the kid started kicking around in his head — gently at first, as he found himself drifting toward the album aisles, and then the idea like a soccer ball that he got more and more comfortable with as he handled it downfield, warding off thoughts of turning back the way he would a closing defender. He found himself standing in front of the frosted door to the booth, a red light above indicating that it was occupied, and through the glass, he could see the silhouette of the boy, who was wearing a backward baseball cap. He’d just started to listen to the record, as the girl’s voice, even muffled by the closed door, was coming through indelibly, softly-firmly encircling Andy as she sang the song’s first few phrases.
Andy knocked.
He could see the kid take the needle off the record and then reach his arm behind him. The door handle clicked. The light above the booth changed to green. The boy opened the door and turned around.
In the back of his mind, Andy was photographing the details of the boy, which he’d be able to call up years later whenever he thought about this day: the perfect half lock of strawberry-blond hair that peeked out of his baseball cap, the freckles and dots of baby fat on his Irishy face that were the last traces of childhood in a boy who, though he was about Andy’s age, was already seven-eighths a man. The forearms that widened just below the elbows, the chest that was pushing against the front of his baseball jersey, the coat of reddish fur on the boy’s calves, the baseball cleats.
They caught each other’s eyes: the boy’s wide and kind, mini-lighthouse beams of blue, Andy’s rounder, darker, absorbent, his brows fuller, maybe the only thing about him that was more filled in. But what really locked were their ears: the girl’s voice, still so fresh and hanging in the air, connecting them, making speaking unnecessary. That voice told them everything they needed to know, who they were, what they shared.
The boy pushed the door open and beckoned with a slight side nod of his head for Andy to join him. There was barely enough room in the booth for both of them, but suddenly Andy wasn’t aware of space, or the lack of it. The boy pulled the door closed behind them. They stood shoulder to shoulder, and both just looked down at the record in front of them, still shiny and spinning, the almost-virgin vinyl. The kid lifted the needle and put it down on the record. The four-bar intro gave them a few seconds to prepare, to take a deep breath, to clear whatever else about their day, about their lives might have been a distraction: What they’d done before that minute, what they planned to do after the song was over, who needed them, where they had to be. None of it mattered. In the last two beats, in that pitch of anticipation just before the girl started to sing, their hands clasped.
As the girl took over the song, Andy felt something transferring out of him into the boy and felt himself drawing something back, and felt both of them drawing something from the girl’s voice, its velvety spike, its lambency and gentle exasperation. It was like a current suddenly switched on. It made Andy almost sick with happiness. The jolt made his knees buckle slightly. In that girl’s low tones, Andy was hearing his better self, or a payback for every good deed he’d ever done. And feel
ing the grip of someone, which as they held onto each other and the song continued, just grew stronger, someone who understood, who felt the same way, who got him.
They were almost near the end of the second bridge when suddenly the door opened behind them. Before them stood a girl — younger than they were, not a teenager yet — with a record in her hand. The look of shock on the girl’s face stunned Andy and, it seemed, unnerved the boy, breaking the spell. The girl bolted away, and the boy, just as the singer finished her lead vocal, unlocked his hand from Andy’s and ran out of the booth. He left behind his record, by now into the fade of the choral wahs.
Andy stood still in the booth. He still wasn’t sure what had happened in the last five minutes of his life, why he was shaking, why something had suddenly, wonderfully swirled out of his control, why everything was very different now. The boy was gone but the record was still there, and when it was over, he carefully lifted the needle, replaced it in its stand, took the record off the turntable and slid it gently back into its sleeve. He brought it up to the front of the store, where the woman was now slurping up the dregs of a milkshake.
“That boy left his record,” Andy said, with a slight quiver, offering it over the counter to the woman. Maybe the boy hadn’t gone far. Maybe Andy could find him and return it himself.
“Did he?” she said. “Well, he’s already taken off. Why don’t you keep it, then? He’ll be back in soon enough for another copy.”
Normally Andy would do no such thing. But that record now meant something more to him than he’d even imagined it could when he set out to buy it. He fished out his wallet from his front pocket and offered the woman a dollar. He would have paid $10 or more if she’d asked. But she waved it back at him.
“This one’s on Rose, honey. I’ve made a nice piece of change on that record already, and I’m bound to make a bit more. I’m telling you, that girl’s a keeper, she’s probably going to be bringing customers into Rose’s store for years. You seem like a nice boy, and Rose likes your taste in music. It’s my present to you. Just come back and see me again, all right?”
Why Do Birds Page 11