Old Records Never Die

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Authors: Eric Spitznagel
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Muddy Waters learned how to play the blues from George Thorogood.”
    We argued through the rest of the record, and by the final crashing notes of “Jet Boy,” it had become painfully obvious that we weren’t in any way musically compatible.
    â€œI guess there’s no point in asking if you’re a fan of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers,” she said with an eye roll.
    â€œTom Petty’s band?” I asked, incredulous. “Well, I guess that explains the Traveling Wilburys. Poor bastard can’t keep a band.”
    I did not get laid that night.
    I love that moment. I love it like I love home videos of my son trying to walk, and falling hard on his face, and then trying to make it seem like that’s what he intended all along, that he’d really been reaching for that toy, and walking is—
pfft
—whatever. That’s the warm feeling I get when I think about missing my chance with the hot girl with the purple dreadlocks whose name might have started with an
A
.
    I was trying so hard to be cool, and failing so spectacularly.
    â€œAre you okay?” I heard Richard with the unnecessarily tight karate gi asking me.
    â€œYou know,” I finally told him. “This used to be a record store.”
    â€œIs that so?” he asked. Somewhere behind him, a boy was taking a punch in the stomach. He made a sound that came out like a BLEEERT.
    â€œSo,” I said awkwardly. “I guess it, uh . . . I guess it closed.”
    He looked around the room, at the kids dressed like Ralph Macchio in
The Karate Kid
, giving each other karate chops. “It looks like it,” he agreed.
    He might have wondered why I was smelling his walls, which didn’t make much sense to me even as I was doing it.
    I could explain it if I had to. It was like when I got my dad’s ashes and I immediately took a whiff of the urn. I didn’t open it or anything, I just sat on the stairs with it and put my nose just close enough to see if it smelled like anything I recognized. It was totally nonsensical. But I did it anyway.
    Or here’s what else it’s like. When your child is born and the first thing you do is smell his or her head. A newborn’s head is just amazing. It’s magical, like a Florida orange fresh off the tree. For at least the first year of my son’s life, I smelled his head at least twenty times a day. But then that wonderful smell just suddenly stops. You don’t know why, it’s just gone. But you smell his or her head anyway, looking for some hint of what you lost, hoping it might come back if you breathe in hard enough.
    I can’t explain it better than that. I smelled the walls of a martial arts school for the same reasons I smelled the head of my non-infant son. Because I was sad about what it used to be.
    Richard with the unnecessarily tight karate gi and I made some small talk, about what classes were coming up that might be appropriate for my son that Richard now seemed pretty convinced didn’t exist. I took some brochures, and I almost gave him my credit card, if only to prove that I hadn’t just been wasting his time all along. Andthen, with one more lingering stroke of a freshly painted wall, I got the hell out of there.

    I sat in a booth at the Eat Rice Chinese restaurant, next door to what used to be the Record Swap, and made notes on a cocktail napkin, listing every record from my former collection that I was reasonably certain I could identify by sight. Or in some cases, smell.
    Exile in Guyville , Liz Phair. With a store sticker still on the front sleeve, priced in UK pounds, bought during a summer backpacking trip to London and northern England. My intention was to purchase a Smiths record in Manchester, which I felt was significant, like buying a Beatles record in Liverpool or a Nirvana record in Seattle. And I came very close. I had
Louder Than Bombs
in my hands, and I was en route to the register at

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