by Dylan Hicks
“Bats for it, especially the Ossis. C&W speaks to them with particular clarity, of course. An old friend of mine runs one of the big stations in Berlin. They just switched to an all-country format, but expertise is scarce, you know, authenticity scarcer. Like everywhere. He says he’ll give me a slot the day I arrive.”
“You speak German?” I said.
“Sure, I was a German major,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t finish, but sure, I speak German. I spoke German when you were a kid.”
“Not to me you didn’t.”
“You wouldn’t have understood me.”
“You could’ve taught me the alphabet or something.”
“It’s the same alphabet.”
“Not exactly,” I said. “There’s that funny B and stuff.”
“That’s not a B, it’s a double-s.”
“I know what it is.”
My defensive tone birthed a short pause.
“You studied German?” Wade said.
“Not really. I took a couple years in high school. I tried French too, but …”
“No Sprachgefühl?” he said. I shrugged and started to say goodbye again, but he cut me off: “You think you’ll ever go back to college?”
“Maybe.”
“I’d advise against it, and against accepting any further promotions at your record shop. Is that a possibility?”
“Is what a possibility?”
“Further advancement at the record shop.”
“I’ll probably get to be assistant manager pretty soon.”
“Well, don’t get sucked in.” He sat up, pushed his hair out of his eyes.
“Sucked into what?”
“Money, status, home ownership, credentials, all that. Embourgeoisement looms.”
“I wouldn’t be able to buy a house on the assistant manager’s salary,” I said.
“Sure you would, eventually. Or it’ll lead to something else. You’ll become the manager, then—what?—district manager, area manager—”
“Regional manager, they call it.”
“Regional manager. Next it’s … that’s probably as far as you could go.”
“Okay, I should shove off.”
“Or the job’ll bore you back to college. You’re smart. No genius probably—I don’t mean that as an insult; I’m no genius either, and still kind of pissed about it—but you’re smart enough; you’ll want people to take you seriously.” He waved a hand like a cat trying to take down a bug. “But that’s exactly what you don’t want.”
As I was leaving, he got up, still in his underwear, to go to the bathroom or kitchen, and while I waited for the bus that got me to work a half hour late, I wondered how much of the day he’d spend undressed, and whether at some point I’d need but fail to put in a request for modesty.
Disco Purgatorio
FOR SOME OF 1977 AND MOST OF ’78, I CALLED WADE my stepfather. He didn’t have a legal claim to the title; he was just shacking up with my mother, and wasn’t even doing that in earnest. He had a basement apartment below our two-bedroom, and while he spent much of his time upstairs, and the advantages of rent-sharing would have been felt by all, he never officially moved in with us. I suppose he would have had trouble fitting his store of records and books into our place, and in fact he kept all but his essential toiletries in his basement apartment, even kept a few items in his fridge and would often walk downstairs to get a beer, a TV dinner, or a cucumber, which to my mother’s amusement he ate uncut and suggestively, not bothered by the bitter, waxy skin. I turned seven during that period. I spent a lot of time listening to music and playing Odin or Pete Rozelle to teams of plastic, green-pedestaled football figurines that ran, stumbled, and waltzed on a vibrating metal field, their numbers stuck crookedly to their jersey backs by my undexterous young fingers. Every month or so my mother would let me pick out a forty-five from the Top Forty endcap of what was then Enswell’s leading discount store. I chose Melissa Manchester, Barry Manilow, Mike Sands, the Trammps (“I couldn’t get enough, so I had to self-destruct” still one of my favorite lyrical sequences), yet defied certain predictions by turning out prevailingly heterosexual.
Occasionally one of my friends would come over after school. Wade only worked his straight job twice a week, and one of those shifts was the Saturday graveyard, so he spent most afternoons in our living room—reading, dozing, watching TV, taking up most of the couch in a pose somewhere between that of an odalisque model and a park-bench hobo, or a sculpture of a park-bench hobo. He had a particularly artistic way of filling a couch, as I’ve perhaps by now overstressed. Sometimes he’d ask if my friend and I wanted a snack. He didn’t care if the snack was big and junky and likely to spoil our appetites for dinner. Other times, not only times when he was dozing, he wouldn’t even say hello.
After my friend and I were in my room, or out in the parking lot of the neighboring Lutheran church, a good spot for bike tricks, I’d say, “That’s my stepdad.” I don’t know if I came up with the euphemism on my own or if I was following my mother’s protective lead. On one hand, conceivably a hand of four fingers, Enswell was a live-and-let-live place with much lawlessness and iconoclasm in its past, a city whose knife-edged tent-town babyhood was led by unmarried railroaders and the scuffling demimonde they lured, whose adolescence found room for hopheads and rumrunners, blind pigs and cathouses. I’m told that for decades a red-light district thrived just a few blocks from the home Wade, my mother, and I shared, the women in spring and summer often sitting, like Rahab with Joshua’s spies, on their rented roofs, awaiting customers, but also just talking or comfortably not talking, sometimes calling out to other groups of two or three women on nearby rooftops, and maybe, I once imagined, finding some of the restorative grace described in Goffin and King’s “Up on the Roof,” so elegantly performed by the protean Drifters, lead singer Rudy Lewis battling the production’s dinky, quasi-Latin rhythm but not surrendering in full to a melancholy that, unchecked, would have destroyed the song. It’s after all not supposed to be a roof from which you might jump, but a roof that keeps you from jumping, by being a serious but not lugubrious place, a place where mindless cheeriness is as unwelcome as mad cruelty, a roof, then, that discourages jumping and falling, through gravity. So while that dinky, quasi-Latin rhythm is in fact terrible, without it Lewis might not have struck the right ambivalence, and the record might have failed, might not have become the sort that enlightens thousands on thousands of radio listeners, that unites the scattered lonely, that seems to sanctify the radios themselves, as “Up on the Roof” may have done, even in North Dakota (where the rats don’t really race and the sidewalk ballet seldom reaches a crescendo) in the fall of 1962, the same fall in which the Jaycees and other blight-fighting civic leaders got the red-light district slated for the bulldozer and wrecking ball.
On the other hand, Enswell was a conservative North Dakota city where, even by the late 1970s, unmarried cohabiting couples may have been sinners in some townspeople’s eyes, such as those belonging to my friends or, more likely, their parents, who, if given the choice, would have preferred to picture their kids being casually watched over by a stepfather instead of some mere boyfriend, long-haired and nearly jobless.
Since I was already lying about Wade’s relation to me, I don’t know why I didn’t just say, “That’s my dad,” the assumption my friend likely would have made had I, most wisely of all, passed over the matter in silence. More than once the stepfather fib invited unwelcome questions about my so-called real dad, whose identity was unknown to me. There weren’t so many friends to fib to, at least, nor too few. Then as now I was neither popular nor unpopular. My unusual handsomeness—really, alas, it’s a kind of electric cuteness—didn’t fully reveal itself till I was in my teens, and by then I’d taken on a tentative antisociality. Now I’m very lonely, an impermanent condition, I hope, not squarely resulting from unpopularity. “It’s a hell of a lot easier to be free of things than to be free of people,” Wade once told me, “but you’
ve got to be capable of that too.”
He left us on Saturday, November 11, 1978, his ears no doubt still ringing from the previous night’s Bolling Greene show at the Enswell Municipal Auditorium. It was somewhere between seven thirty and eight o’clock when he left. I have a fumelike memory of watching him leave, of watching my mother upbraid the fat country singer in the havelock and bandolier, the men standing on our lawn, she standing on our stoop, I peering through the mail slot. Later, however, my mother insisted that I was hard asleep when the silver tour bus pulled noisily away, its scornful exhaust tones, augmented by a hard-to-attribute auroral whoop, still reverberating several minutes later through the dirty white sky. And that makes sense, since I was coming off a late night and was known to sleep soundly through noises louder than shouts and whoops, louder even than Detroit Diesel 6v-71s. Once during a thunderstorm, Wade carried me from my bedroom down to his apartment and put me in the caved-in middle of his hideaway bed, where I dreamed and drooled between my mother and him, reportedly staying as still as the dead throughout my relocation, staying nearly that still when the thunder got louder and then louder still, though I do remember waking up long enough to feel Wade and my mother holding heavy hands on my chest. In the morning I disbelieved there’d been a storm at all, till an exclamatorily headlined Enswell Century was laid next to my plastic, remotely porcelaneous cereal bowl, a Piggly Wiggly premium as I recall, decorated with irises, blueberries, and chubby-legged girls, their bonnets leaking blonde ringlets, the same bowl I used this morning for my sugar cereal. I inherited some of my mother’s things, as was said, such as the cereal bowl and several other things, though pride, impetuousness, or asceticism led me to refuse anything of much monetary value.
Miles of Aisles
I WAS DISTRACTED AT WORK ON THAT FIRST FULL DAY of Wade’s stay in Minneapolis, and my till came up ten dollars short. A few years later, the store (notwithstanding the just-noted shortfall) was granted an expensive and predictably vulgar remodel, but during the period I’m now describing, its fixtures were as battered and wobbly as some of its drunker customers, several sections of carpet were held down with duct tape, the slatwall was badly divoted, and the typeface used for what HQ insisted on calling “signage” featured a no longer fashionable variety of shadow. We—I did see myself as part of the store’s we, not just one of its employees, though I subjectified only with our underdog location, on a long-struggling block of the city’s busiest street, and tried not to introject the corporation’s rhetoric and policies—we barely survived selling hip-hop and R&B cassettes (sometimes CDs), plus double-A batteries, oversized headphones, softly pornographic posters, and trashy portable tape players that at least expired, against cliché, before our thirty-day warranty, leading to seemingly infinite return-exchange loops. A few professional-types came in during the lunch hour and at Christmas, but most of our regulars were young or poor or both: teenagers killing time on weekends or during the store’s relatively rushy weekday hours after school before dinner; families splurging on the first of the month; clerical workers; hotel workers; out-of-work workers; tramps (very few trammps); community collegians; lumpenproletarians; lazzaroni; strippers from the club down the street (usually buying hard-rock tapes, sometimes R&B tapes, hip hop being forbidden at the club so as not to alienate the predominant clientele of older, mostly white alcoholics). I loved helping the strippers; I tried to be calm and solicitous.
I used to say that the majority of our customers were black, but maybe that wasn’t true; maybe only forty-eight percent of our customers were black. Whatever the demographics, the chain’s faceless buyers and their digital hegemons often didn’t understand or couldn’t predict our customers’ tastes and demands, which I believed to be less manipulable, more willed, though collectively willed, than those expressed at most of the chain’s mall locations. Back then I still held the American teenager to be the greatest invention of the twentieth century (the thermos, Wade countered), had a particularly patronizing and romantic view of black youth culture, and was a dogmatic opponent of the suburbs, where I now live, alone and unprosperously. I granted that our customers’ tastes were largely sculpted and given meaning by showbiz schemers and their media collaborators, just as mine were, despite my dubious claims to bohemianism, but I was heartened to see or imagine that these schemers and collaborators were often working at low levels out of home offices, their wallets fat with unconvincing business cards, their faces fuzzy on the J-cards of dusty consignment cassettes.
Frequently, headquarters would send us scores of some expected blockbuster, some big-budget follow-up or ballyhooed debut (remember Randi Randall?) that as it turned out few or none of our customers wanted, and in the same shipment send just one or two of something (AMG, Tim Dog, Marcus M., Ed O.G. & Da Bulldogs, M.C. Breed, Bytches with Problems, LX2, Geto Boys, Lacē, Compton’s Most Wanted) piercingly coveted by every third person through the door. Corporate buying I’m sure is a tricky gig; I’m not here to sling old arrows at the faceless. But sometimes it was hard to turn folks away, especially the teenagers who’d had a particular tape in mind on their long bus ride downtown, who’d have to ride home in the dark with no new tape (the store across the street had a smaller selection of R&B and hip hop), or a substitute tape, and whose head-phoned bedtime might as a result be inferior, untranscendent. (Although the substitute tape is sometimes the one you really need.) Occasionally, however, we were able to step in with our own buy from a one-stop distributor, and a day later we’d razor open a drop shipment of, say, an especially communicable, bubbling-under cassingle, sometimes of a song getting little or no radio or video play, a song being promoted in school hallways, on phone lines, on boom boxes at awkward parties, through the pores of cheap headphones blasting from the back benches, or the vertiginous aisle-facing benches, of happier city buses. If we timed our buy correctly, we could sell a hundred copies of such a cassingle in a week—an abnormally large volume for our store. Cassingles sold for $2.12 including tax, and the margin was minuscule, especially after paying one-stop wholesale, but I (didn’t care about the company’s margin, and) thought of these lucky or prophetic buys as simultaneous triumphs of populism and benevolent capitalism. Always I’d buy a copy of the biggest cassingles for myself, and would write, on the cassingle’s cardboard pouch, the week of its sales acme at our store. I still have three long cardboard boxes filled with those cassingles; they should make, I exaggerate, an interesting time capsule for whichever bureaucrat sorts through my surviving things.
Fear of obsequiousness keeps me from calling the store’s “employee discount program” generous (“The program is that they get a discount on their employees,” joked one backroom Bakunin), but to me it didn’t seem mustache-twistingly stingy. I probably returned ten percent of my wages to the company (a kind of tithe), every few days buying a CD, tape, or one of the few LPs we still stocked or could order. Our in-store selection was lousy in most genres—the jazz section was particularly tasteless and ahistoric—but we could special-order most things in print domestically. That was boom time for CD reissues and anthologies, and I bought a lot of those, including 1991’s Bolling Greene anthology, Greener Pastures (Rhino 70598). Start there if you’re curious about Bolling’s work, even if I’d dock a star for a few painful omissions, especially “West Texas Winds” (an absence rebelliously noted, at least, in Cub Koda’s liner notes), and 1983’s “High Heels, Tight Jeans, and Single Overhead Camshafts,” a cunningly self-parodying rockabilly single, cowritten by Wade Salem, that failed to meet even its modest sales expectations, despite being ably produced by Tony Kinman of then-ascendant cowpunks Rank and File. I was one of the few who did buy the single, with my paper-route money in my first Minneapolis fall. The cover featured a black-and-pastel photo of Bolling standing next to a men’s-room door, still wearing his havelock, armadillo T-shirt, and bandolier, fatter than ever, though thanks to his prominent chest and comparatively thin legs he always seemed more bisontine than hippopotamian, more gallant than
galumphing. “What a stupid song,” my mother said when I played her the A-side.
We did employ some deadbeats at the store, it’s true. And I did spend some of each day leaning on counters and fixtures, chatting with colleagues, sometimes with customers. But unmistakable loafing accounted for a small fraction of my workday. I suspect I robbed my employer’s time considerably less than did the average American worker. Then as now I showed little ambition, but not because I was merely lazy. I realize that already in these pages I’ve twice denied laziness; the reader is free to interpret my repeated denials in the conventional way. I nonetheless want to stress that the full-time keyholder position wasn’t a slack job, or at least I didn’t treat it as if it were: standing for nine hours (minus a thirty-minute unpaid break); arguing the store’s return policy, stricter and more mistrusting at our location than it was at most of the chain’s suburban stores; stocking and restocking; tagging and postering; alphabetizing and categorizing; finding remote new homes for our white security bandages; correcting the mistakes of the sloppier part-timers; hounding shoplifters; ignoring generally correct accusations of retail racism, sometimes most fervently articulated by boys and men in parkas that looked like relief sculptures of portable CD players; chasing the more hapless, alarm-sounding shoplifters through the alley, blurring past the blue dumpsters so often bulging with and expectorating trash from the movie theater (now closed), the costume shop (also closed), the magazine shop (closed), the strip club (still going), giving chase sometimes all the way into the flagship of Minneapolis’s leading department store (closed—I’ll stop this now; it’s hardly worth noting that businesses close), chasing because the chase was proverbially thrilling and because to return to the store with re- and slush-covered merchandise in hand was to return a hero, a comic hero, and indeed some of the less indoctrinated part-timers, which is to say all of them, would laugh, smile, or shake their heads at those of us who were willing to risk, in the interest of a few nine-dollar cassettes ($9.62 with tax), being stabbed with a Swiss Army corkscrew behind a strip-club dumpster (I’m fabricating; nothing so violent or ignominious ever went down, though one time a crying prepubescent essayed a pathos-rich uppercut in the general direction of my chin before dropping the goods in a puddle and disappearing around the corner)—all this conflict and tedium and tedious conflict amounted to something more taut than slack, and sometimes, for instance while riding the bus home to Wanda and suddenly Wade, I lamented my decision to be so quickly kicked out of our enormous, bacon-eyed state university.
