The Record Collector
A Short Story
The music stopped, the song faded out to the thin crackle of the needle failing to find a groove. The crackle blended with the endless summer downpour outside his window to become an almost hypnotic white noise, the kind of thing that people with no taste in music listen to when studying for an exam or when trying to get to sleep. He watched the rain smack down on the small square of paved courtyard for a moment, his forehead pressed to the windowpane, and he watched the open mouth of the never used barbecue rapidly filling with rainwater. The potted plants- her idea- buckled under the pressure of the torrent. He huffed a sigh through his nostrils, fogging the glass. Slow seconds of crackle and rain passed and then he scratched at his short beard, huffed again and turned on his bare feet with a squeak and padded with a heavy tread to the turntable.
The whole long room, the whole semi-subterranean studio flat, his whole life was set up around the turntable. The gunmetal device itself, the tone arm, the cartridge, the two chest-high-off-the-ground richly wood grained speakers- all of it spoke of hours and hours of research and comparison and a lifetime of wages sunk into it. As did the floor-to-ceiling wall-to-wall shelving that was fully lined with LPs sorted in an alphanumeric, chronology-favouring, genre-acknowledging system that only truly made sense to him and him alone. He bowed forward ever so slightly to gently move the tone arm to one side and lift the record up from the platter and flip the record that he held delicately between his two palms. He lowered the record- now back to the A side- onto the spindle again before giving the shining surface of the vinyl a careful, methodical, clockwise wipe down with an anti-static record brush, which, like everything, was arguably the best on the market and was something that he had done his due diligence on before purchasing. Content with his work, but still miserable otherwise, he let the record play. As the music filled the room- first three unfretted upstrokes of a guitarist counting himself in, then sliding into the opening lick, with the swinging, ride cymbal prominent drums locking in to place- he stood on the spot, still slightly bowed like a revenant, and watched the black circle spin.
This was one of the greatest songs of all time as far as he was concerned, flawless, five stars out of five- Magic Sam had bottled magic on this debut LP and his tragic, early thirties heart attack two years after this 1967 first edition had been pressed only added to that. Thirty two. He was twelve years older than that now and- as he had been back when he was the same age as Sam was when his heart gave out- he was still alone in a room, listening to records.
That was the whole problem, she said the day before yesterday in the too-exasperated-to-even-shout argument that ended it all, he always stayed the same. Just him and the ever-growing albatross of a record collection and time slipping by. You know the name of every song ever recorded, you know who the bass player or the producer is on every single one of these fucking records (a second of rage did seep through as she gestured to the imposing walls of record spines and spat out the words ‘these fucking records’). But, gesturing again, somehow you can’t dance. You aren’t even able to dance to any of this? This is your tomb, she said, your mausoleum and I won’t be buried in here with you anymore.
And then she left.
Fuck her. She never really got it, not really. She probably saw the fact that he owned these 17,000 records as an indicator that he had money, that he could provide, that he was a resource that she could bleed. The evenings of listening to music, the mixtapes, the gigs- all of that was a pretext, a ruse, a lie…
The record spun and spun.
Well, that’s all done now. Her loss. She was almost twenty years younger than him, and she was saying that she was tired of being the mature one, tired of feeling like she was outgrowing him and leaving him behind. Saying all of that while she was still studying to do some bullshit, still playing around with notebooks and coloured pens and Post-it notes like a schoolgirl while he had a musicology and reviewing and crate digging career that meant that he could set his own schedule and afford to buy what was without doubt the greatest record collection in the whole city, if not the country. Who was the real child and who was the real actual adult who had made their vision come true here?
The record spun and spun.
Shit, if you’d’ve told him as a teenager (God, that was thirty years ago now) that when he was an adult he could get to constantly go to gigs and travel the world hunting for records he would’ve torn your arm off for the chance. Everything he had wanted then he had now. Almost. He didn’t have her. Or any of the past hers. But there would be some other her on the horizon. Probably. Although this one had felt like the last one in a way, the last shot. His natural rockstar leanness was starting to give way to a small belly that made his thin arms and legs look skinnier still by comparison. And his hair wasn’t what it was. He thought she saw him for what was inside of him, but evidently not. She was no different, despite doing a sophisticated impression of someone who was different.
He felt hot tears welling in his eyes. Stupid. He wiped them away with an angry back of hand. Now Sam was singing about how he didn’t want no woman telling him what to do. A little blurry eyed from the tears still, he almost laughed out loud as he heard that. Shit.
The A side ended, and he became aware of the thumping rain again. It had been raining when she had told him it was over too. The last thing he had said to her was about how wet it was out, about how she should wait until the weather calms down at least. Stood by the doorway, hands in his pockets like a chastised schoolboy as she zipped up her raincoat, shielded herself with her umbrella and walked up the street and out of his life.
That was the final image- black clouds and a rainslick North London street and him with his hands in his pyjama pockets in a doorway, confused.
But he was starting to understand now. Understand that he was now free. He filed Magic Sam away in his designated space and searched the rows and rows of spines with fresh eyes. He could listen to anything now. Do anything. No disapproving head shakes, no little gestures, no tedious compromises because she had to study or get an assignment done. No ‘can you keep that down?’, no ‘can you play something else?’ It was time for something else. He found it in one of the lower segments of the wall of records, to the right end and at knee height. The sleeve was a little scuffed, the record itself was in good condition but not pristine. This was a record that he had heavily played, a record that he had bought with Saturday afternoon teenage drudgery wages and not a near mint, rare first pressing of the kind he had been buying since he became a serious collector and not an honest fan. He looked at the cover- the ironic saccharine photograph of the wholesome 1950’s ponytailed blonde in the white blouse holding a basket of flowers- and his lips formed into something between a slight smile and a smirk. Again, he took the record from the protective slip, perched the sleeve in its spot beside the turntable and put the wax onto the spindle and gave it a wipe with the brush. The record spun and the abrasive guitar and rumbling bass and trademark tight, metronomic, sharp snared drums drowned out the sound of the rain. He couldn’t dance but he could grit his teeth and bang his head and swing his left hand in time to the metallic ‘ting’ of those heavy rim shot snare hits. What kind of person hates music that has noise and aggression and anger and guts to it? What kind of life is it if all the songs are pretty little three-minute ditties? Soothing background music that’s just there, dull and pleasant and unobtrusive- not something that you have chosen yourself, have hunted down, have become obsessed over?
Music should challenge you, should excite you, enrage you, upset you, consume you, amuse you, captivate you, break your heart, blow your mind, tickle your brain and change your state like the greatest drug ever made. She never felt that way. There were just some songs she liked, that’s all. She never got it. He listened to the opening two tracks on the record, grimaced and nodded his head along to Page’s giant handed guitar riffs and his yelled vocals before bringing the record to a stop. He could listen to anything. He could blow the dust of neglected records and fully submerge himself in the noise and chaos of those angry albums that had been the headwaters of the vast river of music he had spent his life swimming down, gleefully drowning in, with each new subgenre marking a new tributary to explore and map.
The records. Though the floor-to-ceiling-wall-to-wall shelving in the large rented studio would always make the eyes of the rare guest grow wide, they weren’t the whole collection. More records were stored in metal handled travel boxes, in wardrobes and in the cupboard under the communal stairs. There were four unopened packages labelled ‘fragile’ on the kitchen counter that housed new LPs imported from three different continents. The undercounter cupboards housed more vinyl than they did pots and pans.
He stood from the sofa and walked across the length of the studio towards the bathroom, humming the riff to the opening track on that basket of flowers record. He opened the door. His humming trailed off as the sensation of cold water on his bare feet startled him. The water was ankle deep, higher. Closer to mid shin height. His stomach lurched as if he had been shaken from a dream.
Oh God.
The grey torrent was entering the bathroom through the fan above the shower, the water gushing in and descending like a waterfall into the shower tray, the volume of it cascading doing nothing to mask the heartbeat that was now thumping in his ears. He pulled two bath towels from their back of door hooks and stretched up to block the deluge with them, mumbling what am I doing, what am I doing, what am I doing, before letting the useless towels fall from his grip, their sky-blue colour darkening to a near black as they became saturated with the rainwater.
He turned, eyes darting, searching for something he didn’t have, his head craning, his movements panicked and useless. He stomped and waded through the water back into the studio room. The waterline had almost fully submerged the bottom row of records and was climbing. Record boxes, shoes, a discarded inside out jacket and a coffee mug were all bobbing in the water.
OhGodohGodohGodohGod.
He splashed over to the shelves and crouched down in the water, the smell of it making him wince as his face got closer to it. His legs and waist and the tails of his robe were soaking now, and he shivered as he reached into the water and pulled out a record from the submerged shelf. The sleeve disintegrated as soon as he hoisted it up out of the water. It had still had a $200 price tag on it and a label designating it as near mint.
OhGodohGod.
He pulled out record after record, frantically, the extent of the loss starting to dawn on him. This one had been a birthday present from his long dead father, this one- had cost him four figures and had been brought with some of his grandmother’s inheritance money way back when. This one he had bought with Saturday job money when he was seventeen.
The waterline had claimed the second row now. He stood, his saturated pyjamas clung to his thighs and calves. He splashed over to a floating record box, one of the ones he lugged with him when he was occasionally invited to play a DJ set in the East End. He unclasped it and upended it, dozens of heavy records thumping down into the water. There wasn’t enough time. He scanned the shelves, the spines. There wasn’t enough time.
He pulled out a record, threw it to the water. And other. And other. What criteria do you use? Value? Rarity? Irreplaceability? Sentimentality? He tried not to think, to simply act. With the open box balanced on one thigh, he filled it with records as tightly as he could, then he clasped it shut and did the same with a second box, his breathing shallow and fast and his hands and forearms burning from the weight and the excursion.
The water was bellybutton high by the time he ascended the stairs up to the street. He had his housekeys, a few banknotes held together with elastic, a faux leather bankcard holder and two metal boxes of LPs. This was all he had.
Out on the street there were dozens and dozens of people congregated in the still unrelenting downpour, shoulders hunched and hoods up. There was a fire engine, a van with a news crew, onlookers and rubberneckers, bystanders in pairs and trios pointing and gesticulating and speculating and chatting. He heard something about a burst water main, about the whole street being flooded, about a wettest day on record. Or he thought he did.
And then a voice- quiet and close- asked him if he was okay, and still gripping the record box handles tight he said that he didn’t know.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Yeah.’
A sigh.
He placed the record boxes on the floor and started to walk up the street. Maybe he was.