Bygone Days
Uncensored!

75 YEARS AGO
April 12, 1925

Miss Annie Lee Brigance of Coleman School at Raleigh, Tenn., has been declared the "best breadmaker in Shelby County" in a contest at West Tennessee Normal.

"You wanna go to the record shop?"

At the time I was living with Bud who, he would tell people, was called Bud because "I got so much bud, dude." This was not true. Bud was born Bouxdreau Etienne Faubourg and had been called Bud his whole life. His family was rich with Lousiana oil and chemical money but some unspoken impropriety had gotten him kicked out of LSU and exiled to Memphis, where he failed to attend college. He cultivated the image of a rich and idle drug dealer, but we was really just rich and idle.

This wasn't an entirely bad thing. Many times during the three years I lived with him I couldn't make rent and he would cover it until I had the cash. Sometimes he'd just cover it. And there was always pot and beer, the Holy Grail and Sliver of the True Cross of the college student.

And when we went music shopping - whether it was a chain store in the mall, a big box like Planet Music or a dusty used record shop - he'd always pick up the tab for that, too. His theory was that as long as we lived together he'd eventually get to hear anything I bought.

So pride wasn't a big deal to me in college. I'm sure I'm not the first to leech shamelessly off of a generous (and none-to-bright) roommate. My parents had precious little money to spare me and my job shelving books at the campus library barely covered my expenses. Bud and his family had more than enough.

We took Bud's year-old Bronco (which, I knew, had been in two wrecks and totally rebuilt since Bud had gotten it - but he would never say precisely what happened) because my asthmatic old Mustang was having a bad spell. We went to this little place on Madison - a converted house with a tiny parking lot and stuffed on the inside with stacks and crates and shelves full of records. The front was covered with flyers for concerts, making the whole building look as if it needed to shave.

It was the middle of spring, and it was warm and breezy outside. Inside it was still late-winter cool and still and fairly quiet except for a stereo - its speakers cunningly placed - playing Neil Young. A tiny desk with a cash register on it was wedged by the door. Some seventeen year-old - his hair dyed a smeary black and wearing a thrift store t-shirt - looked up at us briefly when we entered, then went back to his copy of MaximumRockandRoll.

Bud drifted into the front sitting room, crowded and fragrant with ancient blues and jazz LPs.

"Hey," I said to the kid at the desk. He looked up at me, annoyed.

"Do you know if you have Dali's Car on vinyl?"

He waved a hand down the hall behind me. "New wave, D, first room on the left." By the end of the sentence he was engrossed in his magazine again.

More posters lined the dark hallway, shortly relieved by the muted light from curtained windows in the first room on the left. I walked in.

Have you seen those pictures, usually taken when they cart away the dead body of the neighborhood eccentric, that show a house stuffed to the very ceiling with stuff? That's what that room looked like. Floor to ceiling shelves around the walls, and crates piled on top of crates on the floor, all filled with records, CDs, cassettes and the stray eight-track. It looked like there just might be - maybe - a safe path around the room. But it could have been booby-trapped. I couldn't know. I stepped carefully.

I worked my way in, clockwise, from the door. I found myself surrounded by A's (A-Ha, ABC, Arcadia, Adam Ant) and felt I was moving in the right direction. Bauhaus...Bow Wow Wow...Bowie...Bronski Beat...Culture Club...the Cure...

And there she was.

I had to catch my breath 'cause really, she scared me. Not quite ghostly, just pale and shimmery in the diffuse sunlight. I nimbus of fine, curly blonde hair spilled out from under a battered old Memphis State hat. Pale blue eyes, pale skin...a white v-neck t-shirt revealing nothing except clavicle and throat, dusted with finer hair still, and cut-off khakis. With combat boots. Dusty, split, paint-spattered combat boots that looked like they'd seen action in Korea.

"Hey," I said again.

She was squatting by the window, looking at the spines of records. Four or five lay on the floor beside her - the garish cover of Duran Duran's Big Thing almost shouting from its place on the hardwood. She raised her eyebrows at me.

"Sorry," I said, stammering, "you...you startled me."

"Oh," she said - the clearest, firmest, warmest voice. She stood up, straightening her legs and gathering her records off the floor in one long, graceful unfolding motion. "I'm sorry. I've never seen anyone back here at the same time as me before, is all."

"Right." Totally tongue-tied. I didn't have a thing to say. You scared me, I thought, 'cause you're just too pretty to be here.

"What are you looking for?" she asked, an edge of friendliness in her voice.

I had no idea. Music, I guessed. But wasn't there something...something special I'd come for? Oh, yeah.

"Dali's Car," I managed to exhale, knowing this girl had to think I was the most pathetic thing she'd ever seen, "on vinyl," I finished.

And she smiled at me. Her blue eyes glittered like pool water and she looked down at the records in her hands, shuffled through them and handed the Dali's Car - the sleeve and its Maxfield Parrish picture was in perfect shape - to me.

I took it from her with numb fingers.

"Is that all you're looking for?" she asked, clearly amused at me or maybe even (I like to think) a little charmed.

"Um...uh...I'm with a friend," I said, "you know..."

She nodded, the smile fading a little but still there. "I'll see you around, then." She stepped out of the room, clearing the debris with ease.

I slipped the record out of its sleeve. Not a scratch.

"Hey." Again with the hey. "Hey!" I ran down the hall. She was gone. I put the record down in front of the kid - "hold this" I snapped - and stormed out the door. Gone. Just gone. And I didn't even say thank you.

I went back inside. "What's that girl's name?" I demanded to the kid.

He played with an overlong string of hair, looked at the dye on his fingers. "I don't know her name," he said, the hostility right there, "she just comes in here sometimes. And we don't do layaway." He pointed at the album.

I looked around campus. I hung out at that record shop until they asked me to stop coming around. I took out personal ads and put up flyers. I never saw her again, or met anybody who knew anything about her.