Home from the Vinyl Cafe (7 page)

“This is me at Halloween,” she said.

Sam sighed with disappointment and headed upstairs.

Stephanie and Paul were so involved with each other that the rest of the family might as well have disappeared. Paul didn’t even say goodbye to Morley, who was standing at the door as they left. He turned his back to her when Stephanie said something and walked by her as if she were invisible.

Morley found this reassuring. It made her completely happy.

“Love’s young dream,” she said. “What could be sweeter? That was wonderful.”

Dave said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I thought he was
too
sincere.”

Out on the street, Paul had opened the door of his father’s car, and Stephanie was climbing in.

Morley was watching them through the window in the front door.

“What do you call it?” she said. “That funny feeling when something nice makes you sad?”

Stephanie was sitting beside her date now. As the car pulled away from the curb, she was feeling anything but sad. Excited, nervous, sophisticated, and, to her great surprise—comfortable. She felt comfortable beside this boy. It was a night she would always remember.

Morley lingered by the door and blessed her daughter quietly. When she turned, Dave was looking at the bouquet of carnations. Morley looked at him and laughed.

Everyone was so caught up in the moment that no one noticed Sam, who had run upstairs and was in his room. The lights were on, the window open, and Sam’s naked bum was sticking out into the cold night air. One last shot at his sister.

It was good enough to be alive.

But to be young and alive was very heaven.

               
D
ave spent a frustrating week at the beginning of March trying to find someone who could sell him a box of the plastic disks that snap into the center of 45 rpm records.

He had bought a lifetime supply of the disks in the early eighties from a manufacturer in Sarnia who was going out of business.

“Just send them all,” said Dave after they had haggled for a while. “I’ll pay seventy-five dollars, plus the shipping.”

He nearly croaked when the trucker met him in the alley behind his record store, spat, and pointed to the crate in the back of the van. The crate was as big as a refrigerator.

“Are you sure?” asked Dave.

“Sign here,” said the trucker.

Dave needed the help of three friends to wrestle the box up to his second-floor storage room. This is stupid, he thought as they humped the case up the stairs. But when he opened it, he felt pleased. The plastic disks were beautiful. Half of them were bright primary colors: reds, yellows, and brilliant blues. The rest were muted tones of pink and brown with swirling tortoiseshell highlights. There were thousands. Dave dug his hands into the box and let them fall through his fingers. He felt rich.

He bought a goldfish bowl at a yard sale and filled it to the brim with the disks and kept it on the counter by the cash register. He let anyone who asked dip in and take as many as they wanted, for free—even people who hadn’t bought a record. He figured he would never get rid of them all.

He wasn’t figuring on Brian.

Brian is a kid from Saskatchewan who came to Toronto to study film. He collects Hawaiian guitar music, and when he stumbled on the Vinyl Cafe, he started hanging around, always on the lookout for Dick Dale albums. Eventually, Dave hired Brian. It was Brian who invented the game they called Ringo. The goal of Ringo was to take one of the disks out of the fishbowl and flip it across the counter so it landed on the spinning turntable. One afternoon, after that had become too easy, Brian arrived with a catapult he had made out of a mousetrap. They took turns shooting the disks at the turntable from the far side of the store. The ultimate goal, never achieved—though not for want of trying—was to drop one onto the six-inch spindle.

The mousetrap ate up a prodigious number of the disks, and one day in early March, Dave went upstairs and realized he was about to run out. He phoned all over town, but no one had any, and no one knew where he could get them. Dave finally found eight of them at one of the big warehouse record stores for $1.50 apiece. He was going to buy all eight until the salesman said, “When these go, there won’t be any more coming in,” so Dave left four behind for whoever came looking after him. It was another nail in the coffin of vinyl, and it depressed him.

The same week, Dave got a phone call from a woman who worked at Sotheby’s auction house in London. She called twice a year to ask if Dave would consider selling some of his collection of rock memorabilia. He didn’t want to sell anything,
but after she told him some of the prices that things had brought at recent sales, Dave said he’d think about it.

“Phone in a few weeks,” he said.

In the late sixties and through the seventies, Dave was a technical director for a lot of big groups. Although a lot of them weren’t big when he worked with them, some of the people he traveled with became famous. In the storeroom above his record store, where Dave had his now nearly empty crate of disks, is one of the largest collections of rockand roll memorabilia in North America.

The day the lady from Sotheby’s phoned, Dave went upstairs with Brian after lunch. The storage room was dark. It smelled like a summer porch that had been closed for the winter. Dave flicked on a light switch and bent to pick up a shirt lying on the storeroom floor. It was purple.

“Did I ever tell you how Jimi Hendrix got kicked out of Little Richard’s band?” he said as he held up the shirt in front of him. “He wore this onstage one night.” Dave folded the shirt absentmindedly. “
No one
wore purple onstage except Little Richard.”

He was looking around for a place to hang the shirt. He dropped it on a pile of boxes.

“Little Richard made his comeback right here in Toronto, at that rock-and-roll festival where Lennon played.” Little Richard wanted to look sharp for that show, so he had a mirrored vest made. “I have it somewhere.”

Dave was standing directly under the bare lightbulb that hung from the ceiling in the middle of his storeroom.

“That’s Dylan’s set list from the 1965 Newport Folk Festival,” he said. He was pointing to a piece of paper with a handwritten scrawl thumbtacked to a pillar. He reached for it and knocked over a stack of cartons. “I don’t know why I keep all this stuff. I should sell it.”

“Whose guitar?” asked Brian.

“Which one?” said Dave.

“The Saturn,” said Brian.

“Hound Dog Taylor’s,” said Dave.

Brian had the guitar around his neck. “Did he really have six fingers?” he asked.

Dave had picked up an envelope off the floor. “You know what this is?” he said.

Brian shook his head.

“This is the film—no, not the film. These are the negatives from Margaret Trudeau’s camera from that weekend with the Rolling Stones.”

“What weekend with the Rolling Stones?” said Brian.

“Look at this,” said Dave. He was holding a negative up to the light. “This one will never get published.”

Brian was fiddling with a cigarette case.

“That belonged to Leonard Cohen,” said Dave, slipping the negative back in the envelope.

Brian opened the case. “
Love from M
,” he read. “Who is M?”

“Marianne. Do you like it? You can take it if you want.” Dave wanted to get out of there. He was standing by the door, his hand on the light switch.

That night Carl Lowbeer called and asked if Dave could do him a favor. Carl and Gerta lived down the street. They were going to Florida for a month. Would Dave look after their sourdough starter while they were gone?

“It needs to be fed,” said Carl. “A tablespoon of wheat flour. Once a week. It will only take you a minute or two—no more.”

If anyone else in the neighborhood had phoned with a request like that, Dave would have assumed they were joking,
but Carl Lowbeer didn’t joke. And Dave knew enough about Carl to know that if he had unexpectedly developed a sense of humor, it wasn’t going to be about his sourdough.

Dave got the story at Polly Anderson’s annual Christmas party. Carl had brought a loaf of his bread to the party, and Dave—who had missed lunch and breakfast—was stuffing it, and everything else he could lay his hands on, down his throat. Carl materialized out of the crowd and said, “I see you like my bread,” and Dave replied, “What? Oh. Yes.” And stood there, nodding politely, while Carl told him how he got the sourdough starter from his aunt Ola in Germany—how
she
got the starter from her mother, Carl’s great-aunt; it had been in the family for over thirty-two years. “My mother used it, too,” said Carl.

“It’s very good,” said Dave. And it was, although to be truthful, Dave had been thinking of the bread more as a utensil to convey great mounds of smoked salmon into his mouth. Until Carl mentioned his bread, Dave hadn’t really noticed it.

“I have a genealogy,” said Carl. “I could show you if you come over. My great-aunt made the first batch in Schaffhausen.”

“You have a genealogy?” said Dave, swallowing a mouthful of salmon.

“Of the starter,” said Carl. “Like a family tree. I have it in a frame in the den.”

“Really?” mumbled Dave, reaching for the eggplant dip with another piece of the bread.

When Carl and Gerta appeared at his house this past Christmas with a loaf of bread, Dave wondered if Carl hadn’t misinterpreted his enthusiasm. Dave and Morley hardly knew the Lowbeers. There was a moment of awkwardness
when Dave opened the door and saw them standing there. Soon Carl and Gerta were in the kitchen slicing the bread so Morley could try it.

“Umm,” said Morley, her mouth full. She was staring at Dave. Is this your fault? Dave shrugged.

The Lowbeers left as abruptly as they had arrived, declining to eat anything themselves.

“That was weird,” said Morley after they had gone, cutting herself another piece of bread. “It’s sort of sour-I don’t think I like it.”

“It’s okay,” said Dave without great enthusiasm. Then he added, “It’s better with smoked salmon.”

The night before he left for Florida, Carl phoned Dave with his instructions.

“Usually,” he said, “we take it with us.”