Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (24 page)

“It’s poison,” she says, “but you can boil the poison out if you’re careful.”

Aside from her thing with the water, Elisabeth seems eminently capable of caring for herself. And her dramatic good health has given Dave pause about her water boiling.

The razor spent five years squirreled away at the top of Dave’s bedroom closet in its zippered leather case. One Saturday afternoon Dave was looking for a sweater and found the razor instead. He took it over to the bed and unzipped the leather case, and he found himself staring at this . . . this beautiful thing. It didn’t look at all like an electric razor. Not at all. It looked more like a piece of decoration pried from an Airstream trailer, or a part shaken off a milkshake maker. It was a black-and-silver, torpedo-shaped, art deco relic. It was sleek. It was . . . Uncle Jimmy’s.

Dave plugged the razor in. To his great surprise, it worked. And in that instant, the vibrating piece of antique chrome became
his
razor. In that instant Dave knew that Uncle Jimmy’s razor would imbue the morning ritual of shaving with a new pleasure—the pleasure of continuity. The pleasure of touching the past.

Things are seldom that simple.

The
first
morning, Sunday, was simple. But the second morning, right in the middle of the job, the razor’s motor cut out, leaving Dave staring in the bathroom mirror with the razor clinging to his beard like a leech.

The last thing you want to do if an electric razor freezes on your beard is try to pull it off. There is no telling what might happen if you do. You have to be clever about these things.

Well, first you have to take a moment to panic.

You imagine yourself hunching into the nearest emergency room, the razor dangling from your face and some smart-alec intern grabbing it and grinning. You imagine him saying something like
This might hurt a bit
.

So you don’t go to the hospital—you work at it yourself. After Dave had fiddled with the razor for a few minutes, he got it back to life by twisting the electric cord and holding the razor at a careful angle. Nothing to it. If he held the cord in the correct position the razor worked fine. So shaving became a two-handed job: one hand to hold the razor, the other to twist the cord. As long as he got the angle right, the razor behaved.

This worked fine for a couple of years, but all the twisting and turning eventually took its toll on the electric cord. The razor got crankier and crankier, and one morning Dave finally got fed up.
This is ridiculous,
he thought.

He headed off to the basement with Uncle Jimmy’s razor. He was going to fix it.

There are many satisfactions in this beautiful life, but one of the great satisfactions, up there with great meals and great friendships, with love and afternoon naps, is fixing something that is broken.

The devil himself could slide down the basement stairs when a man is engrossed in fixing an electric razor, scratch a match on a wooden beam, smile and say,
Excuse me. I didn’t mean to startle you, sir. But I thought you’ d like to know that upstairs in your living room there is a woman waiting for you. And she knows all your secret desires and all your secret wishes. All of them, sir. You might say she is the woman of your dreams. If you would just put that screwdriver down and follow me up those stairs you could make her acquaintance. Sir? Surely you would like that. There could be no harm in that. Surely. I know you would like to meet her. For she is part Hayley Mills from the original
Parent Trap.
And she is part Audrey Hepburn from
Wait Until Dark.
And she is also part Lisa Bonet from that movie that was censored, and I don’t think you have seen the uncut version of that film. Have you? Sir? The part with the chicken blood? Well that’s the part that is playing upstairs. Right now. In your living room. Sir. And your family won’t be home . . . for hours. That’s all arranged. Sir.

The devil could puff on his cigarette and say all that, and oh yes, some men would go. (Even some family men would go.) But not if they were fixing something. If they were fixing something
you
know what they would do—they would wave their screwdriver absentmindedly in the air and say,
I’ ll be up in a minute. I am just about done here
. But they
wouldn’t
be up in a minute, because you are never
just about done
when you’re fixing things.

Dave took the back off the electric razor. The simplicity of it was what startled him. All he found inside was a tiny motor and some vibrating teeth. He had expected . . . more. With the back off, it looked like a toy razor. There were some little blue-coated condensers and a few other wiry odds and ends, but that was about it.

Everything was so small, Dave wasn’t sure how he was supposed to repair it. He found a loose connection and tried to glue it into place, but that proved unsatisfactory. He was worried about electrical arcing, so he covered the join with electrical tape. When he plugged the razor in and it didn’t work at all, he thought, there’s nothing to lose. So he got out his soldering gun and resoldered every connection he could see. Then he replaced the electric cord with one he removed from an old tube radio, and he soldered that. He covered all the joins with more electrical tape and by the time he had finished there was so much solder and so much electrical tape, he couldn’t get the chrome cover back on. But the razor was working.

So he got a roll of duct tape and wound the whole thing around with duct tape, and he was back in business. It was a different kind of shave. Since he now had to be careful about electric shock, he could no longer grip the razor manfully. He had to hold it with his fingertips. It was by no means as elegant as it had once been—he wouldn’t let anyone else in the bathroom when he was using it—but it was functional, and it was Uncle Jimmy’s, and he had fixed it himself, and that gave him a certain pleasure.

He still had the chrome case. He intended to get it repaired one day. When he could find someone to repair it. When he had time to take it to them. In the meantime, he was worried about dirt fouling the circuitry, so instead of the leather case, he kept the razor in a Ziploc plastic sandwich bag.

He used it every morning and even took it with him when he went away. He had it in his suitcase when he rushed out the door at quarter past six one morning, horribly late for the seven o’clock plane that he was supposed to be taking to New York City. Danny Kortchmar’s daughter was getting married at noon. The wedding was a three-hour drive from Kennedy Airport up the Hudson River. It would be close, but if he made it to the plane, he’d make it to the church. Danny used to play guitar with James Taylor, among others, and Dave and Danny went way back.

As Dave squealed out of his driveway, his bag bouncing on the seat beside him, a tie crammed in his pocket, he glanced at the clock on the dashboard and began to calculate exactly what he had to do to make his plane. It would be tight. But if everything went without a hitch he might make it. He
would
make it. He’d make it. He was going to make it.

It is always like this with Dave and airports—always. He is always late, egregiously late. He never arrives an hour before a flight. Half an hour is too early for Dave. Those are airport rules, and Dave doesn’t play by airport rules. Airport rules are for everyone else. Dave thinks he is better than airports. He thinks he can cheat time; he thinks he can outplay time. He thinks he can get more out of time than time is going to give him. Airport time, anyway.

As a road manager Dave was responsible for moving bands and their equipment around the country, getting them from hotels to arenas and from dressing rooms to stages on time. This was something, it turned out, he was very good at. He was able to instill a sense of schedule into a collection of individuals whose body clocks often ran in time zones that have yet to be discovered. Now he manages to open his record store, the Vinyl Cafe, more or less on schedule every morning, compared to, say, Kenny Wong, whose cafe keeps more quixotic hours. But put an airplane ticket in Dave’s hand and the equation alters.

Morley has more than once pointed out that his recurring inability to conform to airport expectations is classic passive-aggressive behavior.

Dave dismisses this.

“You are so wrong,” he scoffs. “You have to have something
against
someone to be passive-aggressive. I don’t have
anything
against airports. What could I possibly have against airports? Why would I have a thing about airports? One airport, maybe. But all airports? That’s completely nuts.”

He got so agitated the last time she brought it up that she vowed not to mention it again.

But look at him. Six-fifteen a.m.—forty-five minutes before an
international
flight—leaning forward over the wheel, squinting at the cars ahead of him, weaving in and out of traffic. He never drives like this. Forty-five minutes to go, and he thinks he is okay. And what is he repeating over and over to himself?

Maybe he will. He has done it before.

But this is a Monday morning, and Dave is not used to Monday-morning driving. Monday-morning driving is bleary-eyed, bad-tempered commuters struggling to hold on to the weekend. Monday-morning driving is coffee splashing out of coffee mugs, bran muffins crumbling onto laps. Monday-morning driving is lost sunglasses. And Monday-morning driving is . . . traffic jams.

Dave was a good five miles from the airport and doing fine when the traffic began to slow. A few minutes later he crested a hill and all he could see was brake lights forever—cars slowing and cars jerking to a stop and cars stretched out in front of him as if they were never going to move. Ever again.

Anyone else would have given up. But Dave was not about to give up. Not Airport Dave. Airport Dave didn’t even think about quitting. He swung onto the shoulder and bounced five hundred yards along the gravel to the next exit. If the freeway was blocked, he would leave the freeway. He would bypass the traffic. He would go cross-country. He followed a semi-trailer off the highway and into a landscape of low-rise warehouses.

A hundred and fifty years ago, settlers heading west were completely enveloped by the tall grass prairie. Big bluestem grew so tall that men on horseback had to stand in their stirrups to see the horizon. More than once a careless traveller who swung out of his saddle never saw his horse again. Sometimes all you could see of the wagon ahead of you was a canvas cover bouncing through the purple gayfeather, like a sail on a distant sea. Like a prairie schooner.

The two-storey warehouses that surrounded Dave were just as confusing. He had no clear idea where he was heading as he roared through the acres of flat buildings. And when the streets became long arcing curves, he completely lost his bearings. He tried to use the sun to navigate. He craned his neck out the car window desperately searching for a descending plane to give him a clue.