The Vinyl Princess

by Yvonne Prinz

  “Who cares? He should be preoccupied with thoughts of you, right?”

  “I guess.” I wish I had her unshakable confidence.

  I finish my lunch and head back to Bob’s. The store is busy now and the afternoon flies by. Jennifer and I work the cash together, one ringing and one bagging, and that buzzy feeling you get when you do the same thing over and over sets in. Before I know it, Bob and Dao and Dao’s mom are heading out the door.

  “You’ve got my cell number, right?” says Bob, patting his pockets till he locates his cell phone.

  “Yup. Have fun.” I wave to Dao and her mom and they produce matching toothpaste-commercial smiles.

  The store starts to slow down as the avenue clears out. The B and Ts get in their SUVs and head back out to the suburbs. The street merchants pack up their tables and the locals get on with their Saturday nights in a more desirable location. We’re back to the bare bones of the neighborhood: the weirdos, the street people and the homeless, all of whom have no specific plans for Saturday night.

  For the last hour or so before we close I work my way through the back half of the store and clean up the bins to get them ready for tomorrow because I won’t be here. An old buddy of Bob’s named Roger opens up on Sundays but he rarely touches a bin. He works two days a week, and that’s mostly as a favor to Bob and to keep his record collection fresh and interesting. The rest of the time he plays steel guitar in a country band.

  Every Picture Tells a Story, by Rod Stewart, my absolute favorite Rod Stewart album, is playing on the stereo and I’m loving it and silently thanking Bob as “Maggie May” starts to play . . . what a song.

  At five minutes till closing, I check the store for stray customers, a major part of the closing procedure. We once found a drugged-out kid curled up on the floor in the country section, and another time we found an employee (ex-employee now) napping in the storeroom behind some boxes. I check the bathroom and make my way up through the office to lock the front door. I hear voices coming from the front of the store and I crack the office door an inch and peer out. Two men in ski masks are standing in front of the cash register pointing a gun at Jennifer. I lunge backward in shock and then catch the door just as it’s about to slam. I hold it open an inch. I can’t see Jennifer’s face without opening the door some more but I can see that the glass front doors are closed and the lock is engaged. I’m afraid to call for help because the phone is right next to Jennifer and they’ll see the red light for the line go on. The robbers don’t seem to know that anyone is back here. They must have been staking out the place. They would have seen Bob leave and they might have thought they saw me leave too. A little while ago, I went to take some mail that was delivered to us by accident to Mario’s Mexican Restaurant around the corner. I came in the back way because it’s faster, but no one would know we have a back door. You have to punch a code to bypass the alarm and then it resets itself. They probably thought I was gone if they didn’t see me again. I suddenly think about what happened to the kid at the gas station. My heart is beating so fast that I worry they might hear it. I stand there, holding my breath. I’ve never been so scared in my life. I pray that Jennifer keeps her mouth shut for once. One of the men is telling Jennifer to fill up a Bob & Bob’s bag with all the cash from the register. I know from the report I ran recently that there’s only about two thousand dollars in the register; the rest is credit card slips, worth nothing to them. Jennifer miraculously does as she’s told and hands over the bag.

  “Is that it?” demands the smaller of the two men, the one holding the gun. “You’d better not be holding out on me, you little bitch. I don’t like being lied to, ya know?” He waves the gun at her.

  Jennifer suddenly looks down. The robbers look down. I look at the desk next to me. The red light is on. Someone’s using the phone. I completely forgot about Aidan in the Cave. He’s still in there. I forgot to look in there. He must be calling the cops. The shorter guy starts toward the back of the store. I close the door of the office and squeeze my eyes shut. I hear the sound of their two voices arguing. I open the door a crack. The tall guy is gesturing at the front door, backing toward it. A siren starts up off in the distance. The short guy changes direction and follows him. I exhale.

  The taller guy turns to Jennifer and calls out, “Have a nice evening,” as he pushes open the front door. And that’s when I know. The voice is unmistakable. I look at his feet. He’s wearing brown scuffed work boots. It’s Joel.

  Joel is the one who’s been robbing stores up and down Telegraph. Joel is possibly the one who shot that guy at the gas station. He doesn’t care about Joe Strummer. He didn’t post that comment on my blog and he doesn’t care about my hands. He doesn’t care about me. He told me that story about the bowling alley so I’d tell him about the drop safe and that I didn’t have the combination. He used me to help him rob Bob & Bob’s. He’s just a small-time thief. And those two guys in the BMW? They were probably buying plumbing supplies.

  Chapter 13

  The yowl of the sirens gets closer and closer. Somehow I’d imagined a bunch of cops on bikes pedaling up the street like mad, rushing to my rescue, but the cops who arrive have serious wheels. A posse of them, circling the wagons with blue and red lights flashing, screech to a halt in front of our door. By that time I’ve called Bob’s cell three times but he’s not picking up. I left a message but I’m not sure what I said. My hands are still shaking when I unlock the door and let the cops in. Jennifer is a puddle. She looks even paler than usual and she’s sitting in a chair in the office mumbling something about quitting this stupid job. I suppose that would be the upside to this whole horrible situation. Aidan has somehow disappeared.

  Officer Davis sits down at Bob’s desk and starts writing out a report. He may not always get his man but I don’t think he ever misses a meal. His navy uniform strains at the buttons and Bob’s chair looks like it’s meant for a preschooler under his bulk. Three more cops are doing some serious reconnoitering of the situation. Jennifer and I sit in chairs across from Officer Davis as though we’re the ones on trial. Is it possible that he thinks this was an inside job?

  I haven’t had one moment to collect my thoughts. My head is still spinning with the idea that Joel is a criminal. I’m also hurt and embarrassed at the ridiculous fairy tale I’ve concocted, thinking that maybe he was interested in me. What a first-class idiot I was.

  Officer Davis has watched a lot of cop TV. He has the facial expressions and the body language nailed. He keeps confusing us with each other, though, which makes answering questions complicated.

  “Now, Jennifer.” He looks at me. “You were in the back the whole time, and what exactly did you see from here?”

  Jennifer points to me. “She’s Allie. She was in the back. I’m Jennifer.”

  “Right, you’re right.” He looks at me. “You were in the back, though, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you are?”

  “Allie.” I’m thinking name tags might move this along.

  He writes on his clipboard. “Okay, Allie, describe what you saw.”

  “Well, not much. I was peeking through a crack in the door. The guy with the gun was stocky and muscular and the other guy was taller, thinner. They both had ski masks on, and gloves.”

  “Anything else?” he asks me.

  I shake my head. I fully realize that I am now lying to an officer of the law, which is probably a felony. It’s entirely possible that both these guys have police records and there are probably mug shots in a big book somewhere down at the station for me to point at and say, That’s him. That’s the guy. But I just can’t do it. Not tonight anyway.

  “Okay . . .” Officer Davis looks at Jennifer, trying to remember her name from five seconds ago. He clicks his ballpoint pen and leans in; the chair complains loudly. “Name again?”

  “Jennifer,” she says, annoyed.

  “Right, Jennifer. Can you tell me anything unusual, anything you noticed that might help us fi
nd these guys?”

  Jennifer shakes her head.

  “Okay, what about clothes? Can you remember what they were wearing?”

  “Oh, yeah, they were wearing long-sleeved black sweatshirts, jeans, sneakers . . . or was it boots?” She looks at me.

  I shrug. “I don’t remember.”

  Jennifer continues, “Well, both of them were wearing ski masks and gloves, and they had guns.”

  “Both of them?” he says.

  I turn to look at Jennifer.

  “No, wait. One gun. The stocky one had a gun. But it was big.”

  I imagine the two of them in a bar somewhere, spending Bob’s money, wearing ski masks and gloves with a gun lying on the table between them. Then I imagine them at the same bar, singing karaoke on a stage in ski masks. I must be experiencing some kind of posttraumatic, stress-related hysteria. I start to laugh.

  “Something funny?” asks Officer Davis.

  I feel scolded. “No, nothing.”

  “Okay, so we all agree here? One gun?”

  “Look,” says Jennifer, “I’ve just had a gun pointed at my head. Can we move this along? I need to go home . . . like, soon?”

  At that moment Bob bursts through the door, looking much worse for wear than Jennifer and I.

  “Oh, thank God you’re okay! Are you okay? Is everyone okay?”

  “Yeah, Bob, we’re fine,” I say. Jennifer doesn’t respond. I suspect she hasn’t quite decided what sort of an angle she wants to take on all of this. Being the victim of a robbery could work out well for her.

  “Jennifer?” asks Bob.

  “I had a gun pointed at my head! How do you think I am?”

  While Bob gets up to speed, the radio attached to Officer Davis’s belt starts to chirp. He touches the tiny microphone pinned to his lapel and speaks into it in cop codes. Squawks and static follow. Officer Davis hoists himself out of Bob’s chair in slow motion. He puts his hands on his hips, ready for action.

  “Well, looks like the perps have struck again—the deli up the street this time. Gotta run. Ladies, here’s my card.” He hands us each a white business card like he’s a used-car salesman. “My direct line is on there. Contact me immediately if anything else comes to you, anything at all; no detail is too small.” He hands Bob a copy of the police report. “That’s your case number in the top right-hand corner. You can refer to that if you call in. You’ll need it for your insurance company too.”

  The uniforms disappear as quickly as they arrived. We stand there in the empty store, listening to the sirens blaring and then abruptly stopping. The deli is only three blocks away. The three of us look shell-shocked. Suddenly, it’s dead quiet. The music must have been turned off by me or Jennifer or the cops; I don’t remember. Bob is still holding the pink police report in his hand as though it’s a receipt. Somehow it seems like there should be more. Like, if you survived a robbery there should be a postrobbery cocktail party or something like that.

  Jennifer reads my mind. “Well, I’m going to find some alcohol and try to forget that I almost died tonight.” She grabs her stuff from behind the register and walks out the front door to tell the world about her brush with death. Bob and I watch her leave.

  “Yeah. I guess I’m going to go too. It’s been a long day.”

  Bob looks broken. “Hey, Al, I’m really sorry that I wasn’t here tonight. It was really messed up of me to expect you to close with Jennifer.”

  All I want to do is get out of here now. I have an overwhelming desire to go home and crawl underneath my bed and stay there for a few weeks. “Don’t worry about it, Bob. How were you supposed to know we’d get robbed?”

  We both practically jump out of our skin as the door to the Cave at the back of the store opens. Aidan walks to the front of the store like nothing’s happened. Like this is a regular day and his shift just ended. Part of me wants to thank him for practically getting me killed, but then I figure, What’s the point? I wonder if Officer Davis realizes that he forgot to interview the employee who actually called 911. I wonder if Aidan would have provided information that I couldn’t.

  “See you guys on Monday,” says Aidan, the height of animation for him.

  “Yeah, good night,” says Bob.

  I grab my backpack and my skateboard and follow Aidan out the front door. A ragtag group of street people has gathered outside and they watch us emerge from the store with interest. Aidan disappears up the street. Shorty and Jam come at me wearing women’s skiwear (it’s seventy degrees outside) that they probably salvaged from the free box around the corner in People’s Park. Shorty’s is a bright floral-patterned two-piece and Jam’s wearing a purple one-piece. Old lift tickets dangle from the zipper.

  “Hey, man. I know who did the crime,” says Shorty.

  “No, you don’t.” I sigh and drop my board.

  “Yeah, man, I do.” He waves his finger at me. “It was the secret service, man. The same people who killed Kurt Cobain, the same people who killed John Lennon. It’s a goddamn conspiracy! They’re sending out hit men all over the country! They’re trying to kill music in this country, man; you’ll see. It’s been happening since the sixties! I’m right about this.”

  “We have proof if you wanna see it,” offers Jam earnestly.

  I kick off on my board and leave them behind. I can still hear them yelling as I glide up the sidewalk. I can even hear their ski pants swishing as they halfheartedly try to chase me down for a few hundred feet. It’s hard to run in skiwear when you’re drunk.

  “Okay, we’ll talk about this later then!” yells Shorty.

  I coast home on autopilot. I’m not sure I want to process what just happened. It’s too much to try to sort through. By the time I get home I’m still numb but I feel a terrible urge to sit down on the front steps of my house and sob. As I come up the steps I see Kit dashing from one window to the next, yanking them open and frantically waving smoke out with a newspaper. I pull open the front door and watch her through a haze of smoke. When she sees me she tries to act natural.

  “Oh, hi. You’re home.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, well, there was a bit of an incident with the popcorn—you guys should really get a microwave—but don’t worry. It’s out now. Yup, all under control. Hey, have you got any incense or a scented candle?”

  I walk into the kitchen. The remains of a charred pot sits on a burner and the walls around the stove are blackened. Some sort of grayish foam is oozing through the burners and down the front of the oven. Suki is standing in the doorway holding a fire extinguisher I’ve never seen before and Pierre is standing next to her, looking up at us accusingly. I look at Kit. Her white T-shirt is smeared with black. So is her face.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll clean it up,” she says.

  I walk out onto the front steps, sit down, put my head in my hands and start to cry.

  Chapter 14

  For postrobbery and post–house fire music, Kit and I choose Gogol Bordello, Flogging Molly, the Dropkick Murphys, and the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense (just so we can hear “Burning Down the House”). We get to work on the mess, scrubbing the walls, wiping down everything in the kitchen, cleaning the stove, airing the place out. I dug around the house and found some scented candles and incense in a drawer by my mom’s bed. Apparently, I’ve stumbled onto her Kama Sutra stash. Also in the drawer are a vibrator and some massage oil (and I really didn’t need to know that). We light enough candles and incense to start our own ashram. Kit thought I was crying about the fire, and I suppose I was in a way. She patted my back and told me to look on the bright side: At least now we know how to get Suki out of her room. When I kept crying she realized that something else must have happened and I unloaded the whole story on her in breathy, hysterical bursts. I even told her the part about Joel being the robber. I hadn’t planned on telling her that, but then it all came pouring out of me like water through a broken dam. I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. I felt a lot better when I was finishe
d. I wiped my face on my T-shirt and took a deep breath.

  Kit sat there, stunned. “And I thought I had a weird night.”

  Then she asked me the obvious question. It was hanging in the air above us like a cartoon bubble; I wasn’t really ready to hear it out loud yet, even though it had been spinning around in my head for hours: “What are you going to do?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  We talk above the raucous pounding music while we clean. It feels good. We’re sweaty and grimy and the music is so loud that I can’t crawl into a cocoon of self-pity and anger, which would be my first instinct. Kit talks me through my dilemma with an amazing sense of calm one might not expect from someone who, earlier in the evening, almost burned down her best friend’s house.

  “Well, what if you don’t say anything and someone else gets hurt? Wouldn’t you feel horrible?” she says, squeezing out a blackened sponge into a sink full of gray soapy water.

  “Yes, I’d feel horrible. But what if Joel was raised by thieves or crack addicts, or alcoholic psychopaths who didn’t give him any love, people without morals who possibly beat him and burned him with cigarettes and forced him to do horrible things?” I remember the story about the New Jersey bowling alley and how he hinted at a crappy home life. Was that really all a big lie? “What if this is the only life he knows? If I turn him in he’ll go to prison and then what? The very thought of anyone, let alone Joel, sitting in a jail cell because of something I said is too much for me to bear.”

  Kit considers this, nodding sympathetically. “You think his name is really Joel?”

  In all the confusion I hadn’t considered this. I still don’t even know his real name.

  Even if Joel (or whoever) was lying about his childhood, and a big part of me wants to believe he wasn’t, I’m not the kind of person who snitches. I’ve never snitched on anyone in my life. Well, actually, that’s not true. Once, when I was four, I rolled over on Bradley Wosniak for spitting in Caroline Markus’s long brown curls while she slept during naptime in preschool. I wasn’t a napper. I saw everything. It was a curse.