by Gwen Cooper
Later Anise would say that the worst thing she ever did for me as a friend was introducing me to Nick. Those two disliked each other almost as soon as we started spending time together. Nick resented how much of my time Anise took up, and Anise disliked Nick on the general principle that he wasn’t serious about anything. Nick talked about wanting to be an actor and the one “big break” that was all he needed to launch his career. He’d drag me to tiny black-box productions all over the Lower East Side, but whenever he actually got cast in anything, something always seemed to go wrong. He didn’t want to spend as much time rehearsing as the director required, or he’d have a disagreement of some kind with another cast member. Then one day he announced that he was done with acting, that photography was his new passion. I went with him to the small galleries that were starting to pop up in our neighborhood. He especially loved taking pictures of me after I got pregnant with Laura. But his approach was haphazard, and there were weeks on end when the camera he’d spent two hundred dollars on—an enormous amount for that time and place—lay discarded in a corner of Anise’s and my loft, next to my mattress. Anise had no tolerance for anybody who wanted to do something creative but lacked the discipline to see it through. Hard work and perfecting her craft were Anise’s religion.
“But the cats don’t even like him,” she would say. Which was true. But it didn’t matter to me.
Nick and I were married at City Hall the following summer. I clutched a small bouquet of lilies we’d paid seventy-five cents for in a bodega on our way downtown. Anise was engaged to her drummer by then (the first of what would end up being three husbands and some uncountable number of fiancés), and Evil Sugar was getting ready to go on their first tour. They were opening for the Talking Heads, which unquestionably was a big break. Nick and I found a rent-controlled two-bedroom on the second floor of an old Stanton Street tenement for only $250 a month. Laura was born two years later, and I moved all my clothes, photos, matchbooks, and other mementos of my days with Anise into storage—because once Laura was born, it was like the rest of it hadn’t really happened, like it had all been just a lead-up to that first moment when I held our daughter in my arms and she looked up at me with a softer, infinitely more beautiful version of Nick’s blue, blue eyes.
By the time she was three and Nick had left for good, Anise was back in New York to give up the loft and move her cats and her band out to LA, which was where they were already spending at least half their time, anyway. Anise was on her way up, while I had a young daughter to support on my own and no clear idea as to how I could do that.
Sometimes, though, things work out the way they’re supposed to—or, at least, the way it seems like they’re supposed to. One afternoon, pushing Laura’s stroller down 9th Street between First and Second, I passed what had obviously once been a record store, now abandoned. Through the dusty windows, I could see a cat who looked a great deal like Eleanor Rigby, clawing languidly at a stack of old ’zines. She turned to look at me, and although I couldn’t hear her I could see her mouth say, Mew. Then she leapt nimbly from the top of the stack and disappeared around the counter into a back room.
When I tracked down the building’s owner, my proposition was simple: If he would let me take over the store, I would give him 5 percent of my first year’s gross in lieu of rent, paid monthly, with the option of taking over the lease officially after that. Such arrangements weren’t uncommon on the Lower East Side back then, when the area wasn’t yet considered desirable by the mainstream and real estate wasn’t at a premium. He agreed.
It was Anise who suggested naming my store Ear Wax. With the clarity of hindsight I understood that I’d rushed into marriage with Nick when I was only eighteen because I’d wanted—finally—to have a real family. My father had died of a heart attack not long after I moved to the City, and my mother took their savings and his pension and bought a condo in Florida. She never invited me to visit or asked if she could come visit me, and I never pressed the point.
My marriage to Nick hadn’t lasted, but now there was Laura. Laura and I would be a family. Laura would never be left alone in her room to listen to records and wonder why her own mother didn’t want to talk to her.
Anise was cleaning Lucy’s ears, which were always accumulating a bluish waxy buildup, the first time we talked about my record store. “Why don’t you call it Ear Wax?” she said. At first I laughed, thinking she was making a joke about being immersed in ear wax up to her fingernails at that moment. But then she said, “I’m serious, Sarah. Ear Wax is a perfect name.”
Ear Wax Re-cords, Ear Wax Re-cords, I thought. And I knew she was right.
An artist friend of ours crafted an enormous papier-mâché ear with scratched-up old albums dangling from it, which I hung from the ceiling in the middle of the store. It remained there for as long as I owned the place.
It was easy enough to use the records I’d been collecting in the hope of being a DJ—along with the hundreds of discards Anise donated (“I’d just have to get rid of them anyway before I moved out west,” she insisted, as if what she was doing wasn’t an incredibly generous favor)—as the nucleus of my fledgling store.
A few of Anise’s “cast-offs” were rare imports of the Beatles on mono, and I was able to sell those to collectors right away for a small fortune. I also hired a man named Noel to act as manager. Noel was six foot two of solid muscle and always carried a baseball bat, and he was a walking encyclopedia of artists, albums, and genres. I met him at one of the larger record stores on St. Mark’s Place, which he was running on the owner’s behalf, and knew instantly that he was exactly what I needed as a woman trying to run a record store in that neighborhood. I lured him away from the larger store with most of the cash from those Beatles sales, and gave him free rein to “staff up” as he saw fit.
Laura and I lived happily in our six-floor walk-up on Stanton Street. There was a bodega downstairs that was open twenty-four hours, making it easy enough to run downstairs if I realized belatedly that I had no milk or peanut butter for Laura’s lunch the next day. The Verdes lived two floors above us, and as Laura grew, their second-oldest child, Maria Elena, became her closest friend. Their kids were always in our apartment, or Laura was in theirs.
And then there were the Mandelbaums in the apartment right above ours. Max Mandelbaum drove a cab, and Ida Mandelbaum kept house. They were a gregarious couple, Mr. Mandelbaum’s voice so loud and powerful that you could hear it reverberating throughout the building, even when their door was closed. But he never yelled. He was never angry. He adored his wife, even after fifty years of marriage, and she adored him, too. She had a habit of sending him downstairs for a quart of milk every day when he got home, and every day he would grumble about it. “Hush, Max,” she always chided him. “You know the doctor says you need to get exercise.” When he returned, Mrs. Mandelbaum would say to whoever happened to be there, “He complains, but he likes being nagged by his wife. Better open rebuke than hidden love.” And Mr. Mandelbaum would continue to grouse under his breath, but the look in his eyes belied his words.
Mrs. Mandelbaum never really “nagged” him. Her voice was never as loud as his, and her ways were softer. But bright eyes beamed in both sets of faces, always happy to see you and eager to press whatever creature comforts—a soft couch, hot tea, trays of strudel and bowls of hard candies, leftovers from the dinners Mrs. Mandelbaum cooked every night—were available in their small apartment.
Mrs. Mandelbaum delighted in keeping Laura occupied with picture books or lessons on how to bake cookies while Mr. Mandelbaum would accompany me to the neighborhood butcher or baker or fruit vendors. As I made selections, he would keep a shrewd eye on the scales to make sure nobody tried to cheat me. “A young girl like you, alone with a daughter!” he would exclaim. “Someone needs to make sure nobody takes advantage.” When I could finally afford to fix up Laura’s bedroom, it was Mrs. Mandelbaum who insisted on making beautiful lace curtains from “just a few old schmatas I have lying arou
nd.”
Laura seemed as entranced with them as they were with her, although maybe she wouldn’t have loved spending time with them as much as she did if not for their cat—a brown tabby with green eyes and a white chest and paws who’d followed them home from the butcher shop one day. “What could we do?” Mrs. Mandelbaum liked to say. “We took her in. Max never could say no to a damsel in distress.”
As if the cat knew that Mr. Mandelbaum had been her salvation, she devoted herself to him. She would follow him from room to room, curling at his feet or in his lap as her moods dictated. She was fond of people and had a gentle disposition, although the only person she seemed to love nearly as much as Mr. Mandelbaum was Laura. Many was the time when I would come to pick her up after a late night at the store to find her curled up on the small bed in what had been their son’s bedroom, sleeping on her side with one arm thrown around the soft tabby curled up on the pillow beside her.
I knew, of course, that Laura and I were replacements for the son they’d lost and the grandchild they would never have. Still, it was impossible not to love the Mandelbaums. We needed a family, too, Laura and I.
Every so often, Mrs. Mandelbaum would cup my chin gently in her hand and say, “A pretty young girl like you should get out more. You should find someone to love. People weren’t meant to be alone.”
“I’m not alone,” I would protest. “I have Laura, and the two of you, and my store. How much less alone could I be?”
I knew what she meant, though. I thought about Nick, who I couldn’t stop loving even though I knew he was worthless. I thought about my mother with her sad, drifting eyes after she lost my infant brother. The Mandelbaums had found the strength to carry on after a similar loss. But the people in my family were different from the Mandelbaums. When we broke, we stayed broken.
The best and worst thing about owning a store is that anybody can walk in. Homeless people came in to get out of the rain. There were those who came into the store three times a day every day because they had no one else to talk to. Or else they were obsessive about checking the used bins for the latest promos and onesies that some music critic had just unloaded. I was more lenient with such people than Noel. I always made sure we had coffee and soda and, when the weather was cold, I stockpiled donated blankets and coats in our basement to distribute. I wanted to be part of a community, but more than that I wanted people to know who Laura was. She couldn’t always be in the store or at home with me or the Mandelbaums. She had to be allowed to play outside with her friends, but I slept better at night knowing there was a veritable army in place to help me keep watch.
We had plenty of “real” customers, too. Scenesters clamoring for Lydia Lunch and New Order. Kids experimenting with Latin hip-hop at Cuando on Second and Houston checked out our salsa section. DJs traveled all the way down from the Bronx to buy Schoolly D or old-school funk they could remix. A cross-dressing weed dealer—an ardent Reagan Republican with an uptown cabaret act under the name Vera Similitude—was in at least once a week to quote Ayn Rand and buy opera records. I learned that anybody with green hair automatically wanted punk and couldn’t be talked into anything else. Suburbanites came for the latest Springsteen or Talking Heads album, and these were the people we’d have the most fun with. They’d break their twenty on the new Bon Jovi and leave with something by Public Image or Liquid Liquid because I’d have it playing in the background. What’s this crazy song? It doesn’t sound half bad, they’d say, before digging into their wallets for extra cash.
Running a record store was like being a DJ in some ways. On weekends, when the store was packed, I had to get a sense of the crowd. I could feel the mood shift depending on what music I decided to play over the store’s speakers. If I played the Jellybean Benitez–produced electro cover of Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican,” every single person in the store would be dancing, and I’d sell all the copies I had in stock.
Whenever Anise was in town, whether to promote a new album or to play Madison Square Garden, she always did a “meet and greet” at my store. In interviews, she said the only place in New York she’d buy music was at Ear Wax on 9th Street. That helped a lot, as did the mentions we started getting in the New York City guidebooks distributed to tourists.
Still, Ear Wax never made much money. Everything I could spare, after paying my rent and handing out well-earned bonuses to my staff, I reinvested. Looking back, this was probably the biggest mistake I made. But at the time I saw the store as Laura’s and my future, as our only possible future. Laura was going to go to college one day, was going to have all the things I’d never had. I was going to make sure of it.
Women back then were first starting to enter the workforce in droves and debating the merits of day care centers and nannies. But I was able to pick my daughter up every day after school. I’d bring her back to the record store where she could have a snack, read a book, do her homework. I got to watch Laura grow up, not just in a general sense, but in all the little ways. I could marvel at the glory of her unbound hair freed from the school day’s ponytail, or watch one small, perfect hand tracing the lovely shape of her face as she read her schoolbooks. On weekday afternoons, when the store was dead, Laura would choose records for the two of us to sing along to. She would always insist on turning the music down and surreptitiously, fading out her own singing until my voice sang alone.
On school holidays, Laura would come to the store with me hours before it opened. We’d pull albums from the shelves and spread them all over the floor, hopscotching among the squares of cracked tile between them. Nimble and tall—light as a pigeon—she never once brought her heel down on a record by mistake. On the nights when I worked late, Laura could stay with the Verdes or the Mandelbaums, safe in a loving home until I came to collect her. She was a happy child, and I was happy, too. I had Laura, I had my business, I had my music. It was the happiest time of my life.
Even back when the Lower East Side got really bad, when crack invaded in the mid-’80s and you couldn’t walk farther east than Avenue A unarmed, even then our stretch of 9th Street was a nice block. Tree-lined and leafy. In the spring, Mu Shu—the cat who lived among the interconnected basements and storefronts of our block, so named because of her passion for Chinese takeout—would leave dandelions at the entrance to the store. Summers she took languorous naps on the sidewalk beneath dappled shade. “Mu Shu’s Hamptons,” we used to call that patch of sidewalk. Working-class Ukrainian families lived in rent-controlled apartments above the storefronts. Old Ukrainian women would gather on front stoops to gossip at dusk.
In the storefronts themselves, the kids who’d lived there in groups during the ’70s, converting them into commune-style apartments, had either moved out or stayed behind to open shops of their own. Small affairs, like mine. A store where one person made and sold leather handicrafts. A clothing shop owned by a jazz musician. When the weather was nice, children played together outside. Laura and her friend Maria Elena often came to play in front of my store with the neighborhood kids, where I could have them within earshot.
Drug dealers and dime-store thugs proliferated on the corners of blocks all around us, but never on our block. Never on our corner. Never where my daughter and her friends played with bottle caps they found in the street while a pretty little calico cat looked on, occasionally snatching one up in her mouth and trotting down the street proudly with it, as if it were a trophy.
8
Prudence
WHEN SARAH WAS YOUNG AND THE WORLD WAS DIFFERENT from what it is today, it could be fun to have no money. That’s what she and Anise say, anyway. Whenever they talk about all the Good Times they used to have, one of them always ends up saying, We were so young then! The world was a different place.
If you were poor when they were so young, you got to do things like live with your best friend in a huge loft that cost practically nothing. (Peanuts! Sarah says.) It would be so big that there’d be plenty of room to set up your DJ table or for your roommate’s band to rehears
e, with enough space left over to put two mattresses on the floor where you and your roommate would stay up all night talking and laughing and playing with her three cats. You could go to parties or to a type of place called a “club,” where friends of yours would play records and musical instruments for other humans to dance to. If you knew the humans who worked there, they would let you eat and drink things for free.
Besides your best friend, you would know other people who did interesting things, like being actors or artists or writers, and all of you together would have fun lying on the grass at outside parks and eating hot dogs (which aren’t really made from dogs). Hot dogs cost practically no money at all. Sometimes you and your roommate would save up all your money for one big meal at a restaurant called Dojo on St. Marks Place, where you would get “the works.” Or you might go to a place called Ice Cream Connection, where they made their own ice cream from honey and gave their flavors names like Panama Red (which is just regular cherry) or Acapulco Gold (which is peach).
I miss ice cream. Sarah stopped bringing it home, and Laura and Josh never seem to have any. Sometimes I wish we were poor, so I could get to have ice cream again.
But we aren’t poor, or even broke. At least, that’s what Josh is always saying. Like the other day when Laura came home from work with a bag of peaches she bought at the grocery store. Josh asked why she’d bought peaches instead of plums, because she knows they both like plums better. And Laura said, They had peaches on sale. He kept saying she should have gotten plums and she kept saying that the peaches were on sale, until Josh said it wasn’t like they were too poor to have plums instead of peaches if that’s what they wanted. Laura looked upset and confused, like she’d thought she was doing a nice thing by bringing the peaches home and couldn’t understand why Josh was making such a big deal about it. Finally, she told Josh there was a fruit stand right down the street, and if he cared so much about peaches and plums he had plenty of free time during the day to go out and buy whatever he wanted.
